Anima

The Need For Anima

Many children around the world suffer developmental or emotional issues and sometimes, parents, practitioners, medical personnel fail to pick up on important signs. Children from the age of 4 and upwards sometimes find it difficult to verbalise their inner feelings, emotions and fears let alone have those in positions of care be alerted to signs of issue and distress. Anima with its advance technology solution now allows detection of emotional and developmental issues to be spotted early which will allow for corrective actions to be put in place.

A study in the United States found that 1 out of 7 children in the United States suffer from MBDD (mental, behavioral and developmental disorders) and only 20 percent of them are diagnosed and given help and support. In parrallel we see parents today unable to spend as much quality time as they would like with their children due to work pressures. This lessens the social interaction parents have with their children thus sometimes meaning parents miss issues that their children are going through.

Kids love to draw, quite often their drawings can reveal a lot about their inner world and about the emotional experiences that can be difficult to otherwise detect. A single drawing can provide a wealth of information about the child's current emotional state, social skills, mental development and so much more.

As a parent, healthcare provider, educational facility or child services authority it is not always easy to know what's going on in the mind of a child. Many children are hesitant to verbalize their feelings in large part due to a limited vocabulary, this is especially true when it comes to more serious issues such as depression, distress, anger or even trauma.

Using the Anima application, parents and care providers can gain tremendous insight into a child's development and emotional state, simply by encouraging the child to draw.

Anima is the first-ever project designed to allow for an effective and accurate psychological analysis of children's drawings using a touch screen interface or scanned paper drawings. Anima's unique and patent pending algorithms and AI technology is based on extensive psychological and academic research which enables the interpretation of drawings that children create.

The Anima vision itself is to become the first cross culture and cross geography repository of children's drawings, academic research and psychological interpretation. This will allow psychologists, institutions, healthcare providers and carers all around the world to use our data to better understand and interpret the children they live, educate and work with better.

Our vision was brought to life by the advancement in AI and machine learning technology. By adding specialists in the field to our management team and agreeing an official partnership with the School of Creative Arts Therapies at the prestigious Haifa University we built our MVP which was selected as a finalist from over 400 global entries in the IBM Watson Build Challenge. 

Interpretation in four simple steps  

The Anima solution is very simple to use and within four simple steps parents, healthcare providers, medical advisors and guardians can see an interpretation of their childrens drawings in minutes.

The Technology  

Anima is a cloud based solution that has unique algorithms that combines advanced artificial intelligence and deep machine learning to detect objects that are drawn alongside interpretations of space, lines, colour and geometry. 

The unique combination of these technologies allows for elevated level analysis, especially when the analysis is based not only on one drawing but on a sequence of drawings therefore allowing trends to be picked up. The more the individual child draws or children as a whole the more the Anima artificial intelligence algorithm can interpret. This will allow Anima to fulfil its vision of being the largest global repository of children’s drawings cross geography, culture and landscape with the ability to have associated interpretations. All the interpretations are based on academic and psychological interpretations from prestigious universities, academic research centres and highly trained psychologists.

Drawing Analysing and Interpreting

The Anima solution measures and monitors the development of children via their artwork. Shapes, colours, drawing inside lines and use of proportion are all key factors in assessing their development. The solution can identify any obstacles or likewise fast development in cognitive features and by doing so allow parents to better understand their childs growth patterns.

Anima looks at several parameters when analysing from a developmental perspective. Geometric shapes are cultivated at an early age and the ability for children to identify and mirror shapes in their drawings is key to understanding what children see and their ability to translate it themselves. As regards colours the use can be striking. The world through children's eyes is very much aligned to what they see. Abstract art is not something that developmentally they are aware of.  With the above in mind when colours are used differently it can explain many things about what our children are feeling. Anima also undertakes to examine both time to draw shapes and also pressure applied to drawings. Children who draw shapes at speed can be aligned to brain moverment, communication and co-ordination. LIkewise pressure applied on the pen can creates a good understanding of cognitive feeling. Aggression, anxiety, negativity or even positivity.