Anima is an advanced AI system that analyses the child’s emotional and mental development through his/her artwork.

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Since children in their early years have little vocabulary, it can be difficult to understand how children feel. Particularly, this become a serious problem when it comes to dangerous issues such as depression, distress, anger or trauma caused by emotional or physical abuse. More than 8000 studies have been published about the possibility to get insights on the social, emotional, physical, and intellectual development of each child through the analysis of their drawings. Anima, our innovative application is grounded in the latest psychological thinking of art interpretation. Anima is the first Artificial Intelligence (AI) application that can accurately interpret children’s drawings to provide a preliminary emotional analysis to alert guardians and child therapists about the possibility of the existence of suspected abnormal behaviour and prevent deterioration in the mental state of the child. IBM selected Anima’s prototype as a finalist in their IBM Watson build challenge. We now need investment to turn this promising prototype into a commercially successful product within the lucrative mhealth market. The proposed work in Phase 1 of the SME instrument fits into our overall plan to reach the market by contributing the financial resources needed to plan a fast sound wider deployment of Anima.