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Sentinel.

By mobomo 13 December 2022

Mobomo team members are truly passionate about discovering ways in which technology can solve difficult everyday challenges. For over 13 years we have supported Departments and Agencies in the Federal Civilian marketplace, creating elegant solutions to solve complex problems. Some challenges are more important than others; our work with the Veterans Administration (VA) and the United Service Organizations (USO) has focused our team to find solutions to real-world issues that affect the men and women who have served in the armed forces.

According to a June 2022 article published by the USO, the suicide rates for US military personnel are historically double that of the civilian population. Since record-keeping began following the events of 9/11, suicide rates among active-duty military members are at an all-time high. One of the biggest contributors to mental health is a sense of community and alleviation from feelings of isolation. Transitioning to civilian life is often difficult for many service members. The loss of mission and feeling a part of something bigger and more important than themselves, even years later they express a feeling of disconnection from their military family.

We take pride in all our work, especially in support of the VA and in working together with the Veterans who work alongside us here at Mobomo. Our team is acutely aware of the need for active outreach opportunities to promote mental health and reduce stressors, especially when it comes to our Veteran population. Utilizing resources allocated through MobomoLabs, our Engineering team and technical SMEs began a two-year discovery journey that would culminate in the rise of Sentinel, a human-centered mobile platform built with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities.

The Birth of Sentinel

The concept of Sentinel began with the vision of developing an ethical tool that would provide health equity for all, improve access to Veterans Crisis Line Services, allow for interoperability between smartphones, tablets, and web-based devices, aid in the reengagement of the individual, screen for early signs of distress, and be scalable across a broad veteran population. Current published metrics identify that 85% of the U.S. population uses smartphones, 75% own a desktop/laptop, and nearly 50% use tablets. Therefore, a digital platform was a logical connection point for the community of 1.2 million active duty and 19 million Veterans. Sentinel was designed as an all-inclusive ecosystem, delivered through a simple, intuitive user interface that is accessible across mobile, tablet, and web-based devices. The features within Sentinel were developed to target areas of interest specific to our military members and serve as a conduit for attaining and/or retaining the connection to those unique cultural unifiers that bond and bind service members to each other.

The thoughtful design began by creating an intuitive tool that would engage individuals, creating repeat users, and improving access to Veterans Crisis Services. The initial release has a landing page that provides access to critical support for service members (VHA, VA locations, the VA Crisis Line, Veteran Community Organizations, Veteran Support Groups, and the individual’s safety plan) prompting them to discover different ways to access support services available to them and their families. Utilizing the AI voice automated screening developed by our partner, Clearspeed, Sentinel could identify early warning signs through our scalable and interoperable risk prevention analytics. Sentinel has infinite scalability and can be expanded as usage and the user network grows, perhaps to encompass resources including but not limited to educational and career resources, geo-fencing to events in the direct vicinity, veteran-based business advertisements, and veteran networking, among other features.

During Sentinel’s development, we focused on the unique attributes of the military culture – honor, loyalty, and commitment. As an experienced VA contractor currently tasked with developing the Mental Health Check Up (MHC) application for the VA, Mobomo utilized our lessons learned, constructing the front-end of the Sentinel platform around activities that fulfill service member needs/desires (specifically a sense of community, purpose, and communication vehicles), providing direct access to support systems should the user require immediate intervention. With the push of a button, an individual could access the Veterans Crisis Hotline or Chat, a self-created safety plan, their support network, local resources available to them (geo-fencing), and the AI-based risk assessment check-in tool.

Sentinel’s Secret Sauce

The risk assessment component within Sentinel uses an AI-driven, voice-based technology from Clearspeed. Clearspeed voice analytics proactively identify potential suicide ideation and risk prior to escalations that could result in self-harm. Clearspeed voice analytics technology has been used successfully across a range of personnel screening applications: risk assessment, insider threat detection, protection of proprietary information, insurance fraud, force protection, resilience screening, and detection of malicious actors. Preemptive identification of suicide ideation requires the verbal answering of 3-4 simple, automated, and non-intrusive questions eliciting “Yes/No” responses. The proliferation of research regarding suicide across the Veteran population confirms that suicide is often precipitated by a culmination of disparate factors that add layers of stress on an individual, eventually becoming unbearable. According to the 2021 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, 60% of the Veterans who died by suicide in 2019 did not utilize resources available to them through VHA. Sentinel serves as a “sensor” by proactively identifying those service members developing suicidal thoughts. Sentinel has the capability to detect stressors in the user and direct health care providers to proactively reach out to the user, providing resources and/or engaging in interventions prior to behavioral escalations that could result in harm to themselves or others.

Bringing together Mobomo’s core competencies of User-centered design, rapid prototyping, and application development with a bleeding-edge technology company and innovator, Clearspeed, we built a mobile platform, to include cloud infrastructure, resources, dependencies, compliance checks, and network connections necessary to deliver a scalable, flexible, and reproducible experience. Our team automates every aspect of a product pipeline to ensure 100% reliability on every release. We built fault-tolerant, highly available solutions that heal themselves, which helps eliminate single points of failure. Additionally, we future-proofed our designs by architecting them around containers, micro-servers, and fully managed serverless computing and storage solutions.

While Sentinel is a mobile application geared to support our service members, the possibility of its application across other groups and for different purposes is limitless; and that is what MobomoLabs is truly about – discovering and designing elegant solutions to even the most seemingly insurmountable challenges. For more information about how Mobomo conceives, builds, and delivers mission-critical products that people love to use, please visit our site or reach out to us directly.

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