Success story: Innovating for mental health and building a skilled force in Bangladesh
xCognitive is Bangladesh’s first-of-its-kind mental health wellbeing research, development and advocacy centre. On HCo, Nazmus Sadat has been successful in gaining counsel from innovators and mental health experts.
Impact areas: Personal Care, Beauty & Wellness;
Telemedicine, Remote Diagnostics & Monitoring
Roles: Co-Creation, Fundraising
Stage: Pre-launch
Our innovation journey: Mental healthcare is one of the most ignored sectors in Bangladesh with poor facilities and a dismal number of trained health professionals. According to reports, there are around 250 mental health professionals for 160 million people in Bangladesh, with most of them serving in the capital and few other cities. Further, most people don’t understand it well and hide their struggles to escape brutal social judgements and pressure.
xCognitive is Bangladesh’s first mental health wellbeing research, development and advocacy centre, which studies the overall health of citizens, innovates solutions for their problems, raises awareness about mental health & wellbeing and contributes to policy development by the government and other stakeholders. Our objectives also include training young mental health professionals, developing technologically advanced infrastructure for quality services and offering those by overcoming distance and time barriers.
The journey of xCognitive began in 2016 to solve the challenges faced by this sector. In 2017, we released the beta version of the web platform, DearBUBU, which aims to offer services such as facilitating appointment and counselling sessions, conducting training sessions and serving different institutions that are without wellbeing practitioners. We have also completed some studies on the overall health of the younger population.
Our immediate goals include finding practical & useful ways of serving people and assembling resources to develop facilities for our target group. Our long-term goal is to make quality wellness & wellbeing support available to anyone, anywhere and anytime, with the help of state-of-the-art technologies.
Our HealthCode journey: On HealthCode, I have had few meaningful conversations with leaders, innovators and mental health experts from different countries who offered sincere counsel. Some have also shown interest in working together in the future. It’s very encouraging and exciting to get to know and connect with people who are doing similar things in different parts of the world. I hope it would lead us to some high-impact collaborations and phenomenal successes across the industry.
We are looking to connect with highly resourceful industry veterans who could guide us to realise this national-level project for a developing country that lacks industry experts, technical expertise and funding. We are looking for impact investors who would be interested in being our core partners, and also knowledge and technology partners.
Connect @ HealthCode.io: Interested in Nazmus’s work? Initiate a conversation on the HealthCode.io app!
