Echo - Emotional Support Navigator

Inspiration As a team of undergraduate students from Nigeria, we noticed how many young people - especially students - struggle with loneliness, stress, and emotional overwhelm but find public support systems confusing and hard to access. Haroon’s suggestion to think globally inspired us to build something that helps people everywhere. Echo was born from the desire to make emotional support more immediate and approachable using AI, while always prioritizing safety. What We Built Echo is an AI-powered emotional support companion that listens empathetically, offers simple coping techniques based on Psychological First Aid principles, and safely guides users toward real human help when needed. How We Built It We built Echo as a beginner-friendly MVP: Team Lead designed the overall workflow and coordinated the project. Haroon led the technical development and built the chat interface. Samuel did all the research on WHO Psychological First Aid guidelines and helplines. Qoyumah handled testing and provided valuable feedback throughout. Sommy did all video editing and visual elements for the pitch. We used no-code/low-code approaches with AI tools for prompting and followed responsible design principles. Challenges We Faced Very limited time due to distance and the one-week build window. Making responses feel natural and non-repetitive. Balancing helpful support with strong safety guardrails. Working remotely as beginners with different skill levels. What We Learned We learned how powerful simple AI tools can be when guided by real principles like Psychological First Aid. Most importantly, we learned the importance of responsible AI - always prioritizing user safety and directing people to human professionals when necessary. This project showed us the value of teamwork and clear role division. Accomplishments We’re Proud Of In just one week, we successfully built a functional prototype with a clean chat interface, working crisis detection, empathetic conversation flow, and proper safety guardrails. We are especially proud that our MVP follows WHO Psychological First Aid principles and clearly demonstrates the full user journey from confusion to safe action. What’s Next for Echo We plan to improve Echo by adding more advanced conversation memory, integrating it into messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, expanding the knowledge base with more localized resources, and conducting user testing with students. Long-term, we hope to partner with mental health organizations to make Echo a widely accessible first-step support tool.

Built With

anthropic-claude-sonnet-4.6-api-(conversational-ai-and-emotional-classification)
claude-artifact-storage-api-(fallback-storage-layer)
claude.ai
html5-/-css3-/-vanilla-javascript-(frontend
iteration
web-localstorage-api-(persistent-cross-session-memory-and-journal-storage)

Submitted to

USAII® Global AI Hackathon 2026

Created by

As the Team Lead for this project, I coordinated the overall direction of the team, assigned tasks, and ensured everyone stayed aligned with the project goals and timeline.

I managed communication across the team, tracked progress across roles, and supported both technical and research discussions where needed. I also designed the overall workflow of the project to ensure smooth collaboration and efficient execution.

In addition, I assisted with research and contributed to gathering relevant information for the project. Throughout the process, I learned a lot and grew more confident working with AI tools and managing a collaborative hackathon project.

Overall, my role focused on leadership, coordination, workflow design, and supporting the team to successfully deliver the project within the deadline.

Michael Oluwatimileyin Samuel
As technical lead, I architected and built Echo's full frontend from scratch including the real-time emotional classification system, the Safety Gatekeeper Layer that bypasses the AI entirely during crisis detection, the Emotional Pulse dashboard, cross-session memory using dual storage, and the Look-Listen-Link conversational framework. I made all core technical decisions around responsible AI design, crisis escalation protocol, and the overall system architecture.

Haroon Abubakar
I was responsible for the research aspect of the Echo project, where I investigated mental health challenges, emotional support frameworks, and user needs. I conducted research on the WHO Psychological First Aid (PFA) model and gathered reliable psychological resources to guide the system's responses. I also analyzed existing emotional support solutions and contributed to the design of the knowledge base used by the AI. My research helped ensure that Echo was built on accurate, ethical, and evidence-based information.

Samuel Omidiji
I created Echo's vision and value proposition, drafted user stories and acceptance criteria, proposed key features, and contributed to product planning and user experience discussions.

Qoyumah taiwo Adekola
Aniobi Doris

Updates

Michael Oluwatimileyin Samuel started this project — Jun 22, 2026 01:25 AM EDT

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