AI-Powered Mobile Application for Supporting Mental Wellness in Children

Abstract

Children often struggle to express their emotions verbally, making early detection of mental health issues challenging and limiting timely intervention. This research proposes an AI-powered mobile application designed to support children's mental well-being through multimodal emotional analysis and personalized interventions. The significance of this study lies in addressing the lack of accessible, child-friendly, and culturally relevant digital mental health solutions, particularly for Sinhala-speaking users, while reducing dependence on subjective expert interpretation. The proposed system integrates four main components, including a culturally grounded therapeutic story generator using a GRU-based deep learning model, an emotion analysis module for children's drawings utilizing DenseNet121 and YOLOv8 with colour and spatial feature extraction, an emotion-aware music recommendation and adaptive puzzle game powered by EfficientNet-based facial emotion recognition, and a Sinhala voice-first mood prediction system using fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa.Experimental results demonstrate strong performance, including improved contextual coherence and adaptive therapeutic storytelling capabilities, 79% accuracy in drawing-based emotion classification, 87% accuracy in emotion-aware music recommendation, and 96% accuracy in Sinhala text-based mood prediction, along with improved user engagement through personalized storytelling and adaptive feedback mechanisms. The system further enhances interpretability by generating parent-friendly emotional reports using large language models. In conclusion, this research contributes a comprehensive, multimodal, and culturally adaptive AI solution for supporting children's mental health, enabling early emotional detection, improved communication, and scalable intervention through an engaging mobile platform.