Post by Dalia Hassan

I am beyond proud to share that I have successfully completed and defended my Final Year Project at Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation (APU / APIIT), and what a journey it has been. From just a mere idea written on a blank page to a fully developed platform. Project Title: "Development of a Deep Learning Based Emotional Pattern Recognition System for Mental Health Support Among University Students" APSense is a multimodal AI wellbeing platform built for university students which combines five machine learning models into a single, unified system that monitors emotional wellbeing continuously and connects students to their counsellors before situations reach crisis level. The system features an AI companion chatbot, an encrypted personal journal, facial and voice check-ins, and a real-time counsellor dashboard, all built privacy-first, with no biometric data ever permanently stored. But what I'm most proud of is not the technology. It's what the technology is for. Through my primary research, I found that only 26.8% of students at APU feel comfortable walking into a counselling office. That’s an alarming number, and APSense exists for the other 73%. I genuinely could not have gotten to this point here alone. From classmates who tested early prototypes and gave me honest feedback to friends who frequently checked in and asked "how's the fyp going?" when I needed it the most. And the testers who used the live system and took the time to give me real feedback including one APU counsellor who said "The fact that the system flags something before a student even reaches out is a significant improvement over waiting for a student to come to us." That one sentence made ten months of work feel completely worth it. I want to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Adeline Sneha, whose mentorship went far beyond what I could have asked for. She didn't just guide the research, she pushed me to believe in what I had built, encouraged me to put it out into the world, and challenged me to think bigger than a university submission. Her support turned a final year project into something I genuinely want to keep building, even in moments where giving up felt like the simplest option. Thank you also to my second marker, Ms. Nur Amira Abdul Majid, for her thoughtful evaluation. And to everyone who asked, encouraged, tested, gave feedback, or simply believed this was worth building — genuinely, thank you! <3 In theory, the platform is completely functional, however, this is just the beginning. A beginning to an entirely new way of approaching student mental wellbeing. Next stop: competitions, improvements, and hopefully one day, real deployment where it can reach the students who need it most. #APSense #FinalYearProject #ArtificialIntelligence #MentalHealth #DeepLearning #MultimodalAI #StudentWellbeing #APU #MachineLearning #NLP #DistilBERT #EfficientNet #MentalHealthTech #DigitalHealth #SDG3 #FYP #WellbeingAI