International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Satyam Gupta, Preeti, Manav Garg, Aditya Kr Choubey, Piyush Bhandari
Abstract: Mental health disorders among college students represent a growing public health concern, yet a substantial proportion of affected individuals never receive appropriate care. In India, where the treatment gap is estimated between 60% and 83%, two predominant barriers — social stigma and the absence of culturally appropriate digital infrastructure — prevent students from seeking help even when support is theoretically available. This paper presents SoulSpace, an AI-powered campus mental well-being platform with three core technical contributions: (1) an anonymous identity architecture requiring no personally identifiable information for core platform access; (2) Aura, a custom fine-tuned chatbot built on TinyLlama 1.1B trained on India-specific mental health dialogue using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA); and (3) a composite Wellness Score Engine integrating PHQ-9 and GAD-7 clinical instruments with real-time NLP sentiment analysis and behavioural signals into a 0–100 score driving a five-band Action Ladder. The platform further incorporates an in-chat SOS detection system combining a rule-based crisis lexicon of over 800 expressions with a fine-tuned BERT classifier achieving ROC-AUC of 0.88 at latency below 50 ms. All components are validated on synthetic data (N = 4,200); prospective clinical validation is required.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21768769
