Filtered by: AI for Social Good
Four Computers Science undergraduates from NUS Computing were featured in The Straits Times for AHMA, an AI-powered app designed to help caregivers in Singapore find support services that match their needs.
Aishwarya Goyal, Hazel Low, Abhishek Paranjape and Andrew Soon began the project at a hackathon in 2025, drawing on their own experience caring for grandparents and supporting friends through mental health difficulties. Speaking to ST, Abhishek described the gap the team chose to work on as resource navigation: Singapore's social service agencies and government schemes offer a great deal to caregivers, but many struggle to work out which options apply to them.
AHMA uses a voice interface as its primary mode of interaction, a choice the team made with older caregivers in mind. A user can speak to the app about their situation and receive encouragement along with pointers to relevant community organisations. It currently supports English, Malay and Mandarin, and the team is working on adding dialects. The text-to-speech model was trained on Aishwarya's voice so that it sounds familiar to Singaporean users.
The students have been gathering feedback from caregivers, including at a recent session run by Mindfull Community, a non-profit that supports caregivers and families of people with mental health conditions. Hazel told ST that co-creating with caregivers is central to how the team works. Mindfull's deputy head of partnerships, Samantha Foo, said the sessions were valuable for both sides, and that the organisation intends to review the app once a working version is ready.
The team plans to launch a working product in the coming months.
