Development of FAV, a multimodal AI engine capable of measuring mental health using only facial expressions and voice.
Launch of "Clip Insight": Scientific, Objective, and Continuous Mental Health Monitoring
Achieving both employee mental health and corporate performance simultaneously… Utilizing corporate HR policies.
According to a report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) in September 2025, more than one billion people worldwide suffer from mental health disorders. The resulting economic losses are also significant. UN News estimates that mental health disorders cost the global economy $1 trillion annually.
According to statistics, approximately 87% of Korean workers report feeling stressed at work, ranking first among OECD countries. This high level of stress reflects the current state of Korea's workplace culture. The WHO noted that "while many countries are strengthening mental health policies and programs, more investment and action is needed globally to expand services to protect and promote mental health."
While companies invest heavily in employee health screenings, mental health management remains inadequate. While some offer psychological counseling programs like the Employee Assistance Program (EAP), participation rates are low and anonymity is inadequate. Many employees worry that leaving a record of their counseling experience will stigmatize them as "weak." A more fundamental problem is that surveys alone cannot adequately capture changes in employees' psychological state. Stress and depression often worsen suddenly, and companies lack real-time monitoring tools to detect and respond early.
"No one measures how much employee stress and depression impact productivity. Most companies either attribute this to individual responsibility or remain confused, unable to identify the root cause of the decline in performance. However, if companies could scientifically understand their employees' mental health, wouldn't they be able to develop better welfare policies and help individual employees better understand their own condition?"
These are the words of Hong Joo-yeol, CEO of Pleasant Project. The reason Pleasant Project focuses on mental health is also connected to the social climate in Korea. Korea has one of the highest suicide rates among OECD countries. Stress levels among office workers are also high. Yet, companies are relatively indifferent to mental health. Hong Joo-yeol said, "I want to show people that mental health is just as important as physical health. And I want to show them that it can be measured and managed scientifically and objectively."
CEO Hong began his career at the global consulting firm PWC, where he developed business strategy and market analysis capabilities. He earned an MBA from Sungkyunkwan University and founded the food tech startup Tasty Nine in 2015, which exited in 2022. Building on his entrepreneurial experience, he founded the Joyful Project in 2023. Joyful Project is an organization comprised of psychologists, medical professionals, engineers, and business strategists who work together to address mental health issues in a scientific yet practical manner. CVO Kim Seon-kyung, with 30 years of counseling experience, verifies the psychological validity of the technology, and Professor Baek Jong-woo of the Department of Psychiatry at Kyung Hee University serves as CMO, ensuring its medical credibility. An R&D team of four psychology PhDs leads the algorithm development and clinical validation of FAV technology.
The Cheerful Project launched its mental health measurement platform, Clify Insight, this year. It is currently partnering with over 200 companies and boasting over 20,000 users. The company has also been selected for ESG Korea, hosted by SK Telecom, demonstrating its commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives.
We met with CEO Hong Joo-yeol at the Happy Project office in Gangnam, Seoul, to learn how he measures an individual's psychological state, how this relates to organizational productivity, and what the Happy Project ultimately aims to achieve.
Reading minds through faces, expressions, and voices
Is there a way to objectively measure the psychological state of organizational members while protecting their anonymity and privacy and tracking them on an ongoing basis?
Instead of using surveys, the Pleasant Project uses video and audio to measure anxiety, depression, stress, and anger. It's simple to use. Simply record a short video with your smartphone camera and read four sentences aloud. It takes just one minute.
Traditional surveys rely on employees' subjective responses. In contrast, the Joyful Project measures subtle facial muscle movements, heart rate variability, and vocal acoustics. These measures are independent of an individual's will or perception. Even if they try to hide their true feelings, they can't lie.
The core technology is FAV, a multimodal AI engine that simultaneously measures face, action, and voice. It measures heart rate variability (HRV) by analyzing changes in facial blood flow using non-contact photoplethysmography (rPPG). HRV is an indicator that fluctuates depending on stress and anxiety, making it difficult to control through willpower. CEO Hong emphasized, "Heart rate variability extracted from the face accurately reflects the body's state."
It also captures facial expressions. Even if you try to completely hide your emotions, subtle facial changes reveal your true emotional state. From cues like a slight upward movement of the eyebrows, a narrowing of the eyes, or a slight shift in the corners of the mouth, it can detect not only basic emotions like anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and happiness, but also more complex ones.
Acoustic characteristics such as pitch, intensity, speech rate, and pause duration are extracted through the reading of four sentences. A depressed person's voice has a lower register, speaks slowly, and lacks energy. A stressed person's voice becomes higher and faster. These vocal characteristics are objective indicators of an individual's emotional state.
The data independently extracted by the three models is then fused in the final stage using a multimodal machine learning (ML) algorithm. Rather than simply averaging the three scores, this algorithm learns the correlations and weights between each modality.
"Stress signals may be strong on the face but weaker on the voice. The opposite can also be true. The algorithm learns these individual signal patterns, becoming more accurate over time."
Providing a variety of stress-relieving content
"The ultimate goal is to achieve both individual happiness and organizational productivity. These two things don't conflict. When employees are mentally healthy, the organization performs better."
Climb Insights is an integrated mental health platform based on FAV technology, enabling individuals and businesses to measure and manage their psychological health with objective data. The name is derived from the words "Climb," meaning "growth," and "Clarify," meaning "clarification." The entire cycle of measurement, analysis, recommendations, implementation, tracking, and improvement is automated within the platform, simultaneously meeting the needs of both individual users and business managers.
It doesn't stop at just measurement. After analyzing the results, the system suggests customized solutions based on the user's age, gender, occupation, and current emotional state. For example, a stressed female office worker in her 20s might be given priority for meditation, yoga, and psychological counseling, while a user experiencing high levels of depression might be offered professional counseling and music therapy. Solutions tailored to each individual's characteristics and current state are automatically selected.
The app integrates with a variety of partner services, including over 150 healing music tracks, 250 health videos (stretching, breathing, meditation, Pilates), sleep solutions, AI posture correction, and nutrition coaching. Based on your diagnosis, this content is automatically curated and presented to you in a personalized manner.
We also offer "Mind Talk," a one-on-one professional counseling service that allows you to speak anonymously and for free with a professional counselor. You can conveniently utilize this service without having to go through the HR department to request a consultation or travel to meet with a counselor.
"Many people want to seek counseling, but they hesitate because of the cost. Face-to-face counseling has a high barrier to entry. Cliphy Insight lowers this barrier by offering 100% anonymous counseling."
An individual's mental health directly affects the performance of the organization.
Corporate managers and HR professionals can monitor the mental health status of the entire organization and stress levels by department at a glance through an enterprise dashboard. For departments with high stress levels, on-site investigations can be conducted to identify the cause and develop improvement measures. Trend analysis over time can also identify correlations with major organizational events, and data can be used to demonstrate the tangible effects of policies, such as a reduction in anxiety levels after the implementation of a specific program.
Administrators cannot access any data that could identify individuals. Administrators can only view aggregate data at the organization level.
"If companies have employee mental health data, they can develop better HR policies. If stress levels rise during a specific period, they can reexamine work structures and implement better welfare policies. While individual data is important, understanding trends across the organization is even more crucial."
The Joyful Project partners with B2B clients, including insurance companies, corporate welfare platforms, and health screening companies, and reaches end users through their platforms. Going forward, the company is exploring new partnership opportunities, including AI interviewing, sports performance measurement, and nutrition coaching platforms.
We are also actively pursuing technological advancements. Plans include improving voice analysis accuracy, improving environmental noise removal algorithms, enhancing personalized analysis, and enabling integration with wearable devices. Furthermore, we are collaborating with Kyung Hee Medical Center to continuously accumulate clinical data, further strengthening our medical credibility.
We're also pursuing global expansion, starting with Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong in the Asia Pacific region and ultimately expanding to North America and Europe. CEO Hong stated, "The importance of mental health is a global issue. However, we need to localize our services to accommodate the culture and regulations of each market."
“I hope it becomes standard practice for employees to have mental health screenings as part of their physicals.”
It's only recently that the mental health of office workers has begun to receive attention in Korean society. Both companies and individuals are still seeking ways to manage their mental health. The answer presented by the Happy Project is "measurement." It embodies the truth that what you can't measure, you can't manage, and what you can't manage, you can't improve, through technology.
Because an individual's mental health is directly linked to the performance of an organization, it is necessary to systematically support this at the organizational level.
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