The AI-based startup that will help post-trauma victims

The October 7 massacre stands out as one of the most serious mental health crises in Israel's history, both in terms of the scope of the population exposed to the events and in terms of the experiences of the fighters on the battlefield. Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of post-traumatic people will be added to Israel for whom the welfare services will have to respond.

A new Israeli start-up, called "Mitziti", seeks to harness artificial intelligence to ease the bureaucratic process for those victims. The Innovation Accelerator of the College of Administration's academic track, under which the project was developed, is part of a unique program of its kind in Israel as part of master's studies at the College's School of Design and Innovation.

"It all started when I first met my partner, a post-traumatic victim himself, who took six years for the health system to recognize the 40% disability he suffers from," says Limor Haim Matitiyo, a member of the project's founding team and a master's degree student within the academic track's innovation accelerator College of Management. "I was horrified by the opacity of the system, by the stories I heard. It got a twist long before the war, in July 2023, when two post-traumatics committed suicide because of the procrastination, and we said we had to put an end to it."

The establishment team includes two officers serving in the regular army and another commander of an active reserve company. Haim Matityahu adds: "With the beginning of the war, our project took on a new importance. Despite the challenges associated with serving in significant and demanding positions in the army – we felt it was our duty to complete the project."

"Actually, it is a digital platform that accompanies the victim in combination with artificial intelligence," says Major Eyal Dichter, the co-founder of the project. "Already today there are many bodies and associations that provide assistance to the victims. However, some of them are manual, at best semi-automatic and necessarily disconnected from each other – which makes it difficult to concentrate the bureaucracy in one place."

The application, according to Dichter, will provide a voice assistant, who will ask the victim in the morning how his day is going, remind him of various meetings and documents that he needs to sign or send, and even allow a measurement to be taken that will reflect on the victim. "If at first the victim was unable to sleep five days a week and is now in the process of improving and had only three challenging nights, the system will know how to flood the positive process that the victim is going through. It is a system that learns you without compromising privacy," he added.

At the launch event, held last week, the project won the judges' favorite award. Major Dichter says: "We have already been contacted by a number of international organizations that are interested in investing in Israel following the war, and believe that the project will provide a solution to the hundreds of thousands of trauma victims that will unfortunately be discovered in Israel in the coming years. In the establishment team, three out of five are intimately familiar with the topic of post-trauma, which allowed us to characterize the scope of the problem in a very precise way. We seek to provide a technological solution, a kind of prosthesis for mental disability, with the aim of facilitating the process that the victims of post-trauma often cannot contain."