Tech meets wellness: CS student innovates U-M mental health app

September 10, 2024
CS major Jack Seel spearheaded the development of Healing Blue, an app that aims to provide easy access to mental health resources on campus.
A cartoon smartphone illustration with a zoomed in app featuring a block M and the healing blue logo, all against a yellow pixelated background.

In a remarkable fusion of technology and mental health, University of Michigan computer science student Jack Seel has helped develop a groundbreaking app called Healing Blue. This innovative tool is designed to seamlessly connect faculty, staff, and students at U-M with vital mental health resources available on campus.

Jack joined the Healing Blue team as part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), which partners undergraduate students with researchers and organizations across U-M to participate in a variety of projects. For Jack, signing on to help with the development of Healing Blue was an easy choice.

“I really liked the idea of making something that will have a tangible impact on people’s day-to-day lives,” he said. “I’m contributing to something that will really help people and make a difference.”

Together with his mentors Sandy Zalmout, Chris Laurinec, and Kathleen Ignatoski; designers Anna Kaplan, Rui Zhang, and Sydney Lauer; and fellow developer and CS student CC Ly, Jack and the team sought to create an all-in-one mental health resource to serve the entire U-M community.

U-M has a large arsenal of mental health resources available to its community members, but they are widely distributed and can be hard to locate if you don’t know where to look. Before Healing Blue, there was no single place someone could go to search university-wide for relevant resources.

The first step in developing the app, therefore, was collating a list of all existing mental health resources at the university.

“In the beginning stages of the app, we were first tasked with finding all the resources at U-M that are available to students, faculty, staff,” Jack described. “This involved scanning a lot of university websites and reaching out to different departments and organizations to get details about what mental health services they offer.”

After creating this repository, Jack then worked to develop a filtering process that helps tailor resources to a given individual depending on their needs. Upon entering the app, users are guided through a brief screening, where they are prompted to select how they are feeling, what concerns or issues they might be dealing with, and the types of services they are interested in.

3 phone screenshots featuring the Healing Blue dashboard and two screening questions, one about how the user is feeling and the second about what concerns they may have.
The Healing Blue app prompts users to complete a screening, which helps filter mental health resources depending on their mood and concerns.

After completing the screening, the app creates a filtered list of relevant mental health resources tailored to the user’s needs, from information about disability accommodations at the university to options for mental health treatment on campus, and more.

“The app narrows down all the university resources to the ones that are most applicable to you,” said Jack. “The goal is to make it a lot easier and less overwhelming to find programs and services that meet your needs, rather than individually scouring the hundreds of university resources that are out there.”

Two phone screenshots showing a list of resources generated by the Healing Blue app and the summary and contact information that shows on the screen when a user clicks on one of the resources.
The Healing Blue app generates a list of resources based on a user’s screening. Clicking on a resource provides a summary and contact information.

After nearly two years of development, the Healing Blue app is now live and available to download on the App Store for iOS devices. An Android version will also be released soon.

In addition to wrapping up his senior year at U-M, Jack plans to continue to fine-tune the Healing Blue app to allow users to better navigate mental health resources on campus. Specifically, he aims to hone the app’s filtering system so that it generates results by best fit, meaning the most relevant resources will appear first.

“In the current version, resources that are applicable to you are listed in alphabetical order,” he said. “I’m working on an update that will instead rank them by best match, so it would list resources by how well they fit the results of the screening.”

Jack may also be helping other universities launch their own mental health apps. For instance, a team from University of Melbourne, who gave the keynote presentation at U-M’s Beautiful Minds neurodiversity conference in April, has expressed interest in a similar tool.

Developing Healing Blue has been a rewarding experience for Jack, providing him with a valuable opportunity to put the skills he’s learned in class into practice in the real world.

“My classes at U-M have allowed me to learn different tools for building apps and other types of software,” he said. “This project gave me the chance to take what I learned and build something meaningful and that will hopefully help a lot of people on campus.”