Techies in Residence - TAMHI

TAMHI is a mental health awareness charity set up in 2011 by Joe Donnelly and Stephen McLaughlin in memory of Thomas “Tammy Tucker” McLaughlin who took his own life in 2009.

TAMHI stands for Tackling Awareness of Mental Health Issues and the charity is set up to work with sport groups willing to use the power of sport to promote Positive Mental Fitness.

Sport is reflective of our society as a whole and therefore it is important that sport addresses the importance of promoting a positive mental fitness for all. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that one in four of us will experience a mental illness at some point in their lives.

Participating in sport has a positive contribution to make to a person’s welfare if their experience is one that reflects the positive values of sport:

• Fun
• Friendship
• Commitment
• Honesty
• Teamwork
• Fair competition
• Inclusion

The Problem

TAMHI  is a charity set up to work with sports groups who use the positive power of sports to promote positive mental health.

They work with a number of volunteer led organisations and have recurring issues around collecting and reporting relevant data.

Currently data is collected on paper, and not being sufficiently converted into a digital form. When it is formally entered, it is collected in 3 different software services, which don’t communicate.

A properly regulated and coherent system could help TAMHI and other organisations to properly benchmark for future funding reports and help with gaps in the service.

The main users of the service are kids, so collecting data can be difficult and unwieldy.

Through Techies in Residence, we’re proposing the following:

To develop a mobile application that can be used by the kids to create their own profile and then ‘check-in’ to volunteer organisations on a regular basis to keep track of their activity with partner organisations. A points system will be used to gamify the process and motivate the kids to sustain the check-in process by incentivising them to compete in a friendly competition to see who can check-in the most.

The mobile application aims to solve the data collection component of the problem and lays the foundation for a data analytics tool to be later implemented for reporting and charting information. A prototype dashboard will be developed for use by TAMHI to view a list of kids profiles and their associated check-ins but will not provide analytics on this data. 

To find out more about this project, and the rest of the Techies in Residence programme check their website - techinres.com or follow them on Twitter - @techinres.