AWS Is How: Smiling Mind Is Providing Mindfulness Tools to Homes and Classrooms
Using scalable AWS infrastructure, Smiling Mind can quickly scale its app up and down based on demand without needing to maintain actual hardware.
Addressing mental wellness and resilience is critical, and Smiling Mind aims to fill in the gaps. Mental wellness is a serious concern, especially for young people. According to the World Health Organization, one in every eight people lives with a mental disorder. For children ages 10–19 years old, this rate is one in seven. Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among those 15–19 years old.
Australian nonprofit organization Smiling Mind, led by CEO and clinical psychologist Dr. Addie Wootten, provides preventative mental health programs for people to use at home, at school, and in the workplace. Its Smiling Mind app is an evidence-based preventative mental health tool developed by psychologists and educators. The free-to-use mobile app has been downloaded by over seven million people—a scale that Smiling Mind achieved using Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The Smiling Mind app hosts programs that help people develop mental fitness skills and support their mental wellness, such as programs around sleep, stress, relationships, and performance. These courses are tailored to children, adolescents, and adults alike and aim to connect users to accessible mental health tools in any place, at any time. When creating the mobile app in 2013, Smiling Mind sought a scalable cloud infrastructure that could reach millions of users around the world. Smiling Mind knew that AWS was the optimal solution to support its growth.
Smiling Mind worked closely with its AWS account manager to optimize the infrastructure so it could scale to all seven million users. The app’s infrastructure is powered by several AWS services, like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, as well as AWS Amplify, a set of purpose-built tools and features that lets front-end web and mobile developers quickly build full-stack applications on AWS.
Smiling Mind has improved the performance and availability of its offerings while using AWS services. For example, teachers can navigate between pages instantly when using Learning Hub, a school-based service offered by Smiling Mind and powered by AWS Amplify. These programs are used by one-third of all educators in Australia.
Using scalable AWS infrastructure, Smiling Mind can quickly scale its app up and down based on demand without needing to maintain actual hardware. Millions of users around the world can access the Smiling Mind app and receive important education to benefit their mental health. In fact, its programs have reached 8.6 million young people around the world.
