Helping Teenagers Relieve Psychological Pressures: A Micro-blog Based System

The rapid development of economy and society brings unprecedentedly intensive competition and adolescent psychological pressures to current teenagers. If these psychological pressures could not be resolved properly, they will turn to mental problems, which will finally lead to serious consequences, such as suicide or aggressive behaviors. Traditional face-to-face psychological diagnosis and treatment cannot meet the demand of relieving teenagers’ stress completely due to its lack of timeliness and diversity. With micro-blog becoming a popular media channel for teenagers’ information acquisition, interaction, self-expression and emotion release, we present a system called tHelper for sensing and easing teenagers’ psychological pressures in study, communication, affection, or self-recognition through micro-blog. The system adopts Gaussian Process to classify a teenager’s pressure (i.e., pressure category, as well as pressure level) based on a number of features extracted from his/her tweets. Then the system provides various methods to help pressurized teenagers relieve their stress according to the sensing results, by sending positive stories, proverbs, pictures, or cheerful jokes, suggesting simple breathing and muscle relaxation exercises, guiding the teenagers to write down something for self expression, and at the worst case notifying their guardians (who have registered the system beforehand) via mobile phone messages. tHelper demonstrates how microblog can be turned into a new kind of adolescent mental education mode to complement and enhance the traditional face-to-face treatment by psychological doctors.