One Page Summary

In Italy there are 80.000 kids (age between 13 and 24 years) with special educational needs, in particular not educated to a healthy and conscious use of social networks. Often for these kids, virtual channels like Facebook are likely to become not very useful, if not dangerous, to socialize with their peers. With Mindbook, through the chat support of certified tutors and psychologists, we educate these kids to a correct use of social networks: kids with social disadvantages, mental retardation, autism and other neuropsychological problems are followed one to one by chat to help them recognize unappropriate actions and to learn how to use common social network functions in a correct way. This is done through a chatbot that acts as a link between the kid, who can access Mindbook either from a dedicated app or directly from Facebook Messenger, and the tutors, who have a dedicated platform that allow them to interact with the kid easily and instantly. Furthermore tutors can follow all Facebook kid’s actions and chat among them and with parents, to better respond to kid’s questions or to proactively intervene, if necessary. Using a messenger chatbot will speed the launch of the first prototype and allow kids to chat directly with Facebook Messenger App, without the need to install and learn a different app. In a second step it will be possible to develop a dedicate mobile app with additional features.
The great advantage of this solution is the use of a “chat approach”: this communication paradigm is well known, especially by kids, and this lowers the access barriers.

Link Video