Startup
Posted: 2 years ago
Author: Nina Gomarteli

Ensofy Monitors Mental Health of Your Employees Using Artificial Intelligence

About 1 year ago Irakli Lezhava and Iveri Prangishvili created a mental health platform with psychotherapists. The platform enabled organizations and employers to take care of the mental health of their employees. By that point, the founders already knew that a large proportion of employees in companies were experiencing burnout job, which would often lead them to quit their jobs.

The pandemic has aggravated the issue, and businesses have already paid a high price in terms of losing employees or their low productivity.

After launching their platform, the founders saw that companies were already using various programs to improve the mental health of employees, including the help of psychologists. However, in reality, these programs were used by a very small part of the staff. According to Irakli Lezhava, the real problem that large companies and employers have is that they don’t know what part of their employees is experiencing burnout and who specifically needs active help.

‘’Existing approaches are very general and require the company employee to approach his/her supervisor and ask for help, which for many reasons happens very rarely. Our product allows employers to know what part of their employees suffers from burnout. At the same time, our approach ensures the privacy of companies and the personal space of employees, which the existing approaches fail to achieve,’’ said Irakli Lezhava in a conversation with CBW. 

Existing approaches are very general and require the company employee to approach his/her supervisor or employer and ask for help, which for many reasons happens very rarely. Our product allows employers to know exactly who among their employees need help and what part of them suffer from burnout. At the same time, our approach ensures the privacy of companies and the personal space of employees, which the existing approaches fail to achieve,’’ said Irakli Lezhava in a conversation with CBW. 

Irakli Lezhava and Iveri Prangishvili have been working in the field of digital healthcare and artificial intelligence for over 10 years. Irakli has been working with diagnostic companies and organizations in the field of oncology, cardiology, and neurology for the last 5 years. As Irakli explained, there are already excellent and accurate technologies and products in these areas that allow physicians and other healthcare professionals to know exactly what problems their patients and clients are facing. For example, neurologists are now able to determine with very high accuracy whether a person has Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease through these technologies, which was not possible in the past.

‘’Unfortunately in the field of mental health diagnostics, there have been no innovations of a similar scale in the last 20-30 years. Consequently, existing diagnostic approaches are quite outdated and relatively inaccurate. My future vision with my partner is to develop a product that will diagnose various mental health problems in humans with greater accuracy than current diagnostic standards,’’ said Irakli Lezhava. 

At Ensofy their goal is to reduce employee turnover rates and increase workforce productivity by detecting burnout as early as possible. The ensofy team utilizes a state-of-art AI model that detects burnout in an individual’s voice - quantifying their symptoms in real-time. The model helps employers engage more effectively with their employees and reduce their turnover levels.

‘’Our VoiceAI tool is based on the leading neural network model in the field and is specifically trained to detect burnout symptoms in the voice. Our tool analyzes low-level vocal inputs, such as pitch and speech intensity, and quantifies burnout in real-time, providing an objective and reliable assessment of an individual’s mental well-being. To ensure privacy and confidentiality of your employees we do not analyze speech content and require only short audio recordings.’’ discusses Irakli. 

Ensofy is one of the 20 startups in Georgia that won a 100,000 GEL co-financing grant program from GITA. An investment committee of high-level international venture investors made the decision that will help the startup to provide valuable and actionable insights about your workforce and individuals, enabling organizations to triage and engage with the team as early as possible.