A Menlo Park mother plans to launch a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence and a cartoon squirrel to help adolescent boys better communicate their emotional state with parents.

Why boys?

Patrina Mack, founder of the app called K’Bro — short for “Are you OK, bro?” — said the idea came to her when she was going through a tough divorce and observed how difficult it was for her young son.

“Schools are really geared toward girls and they don’t know how to manage boy energy,” said Mack, who runs a product consulting firm and serves on the board of Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. “Where is the safe place for a boy to share his feelings when he’s pulling away from both parents? It happens and kids are just not sharing, in large part because of shame and stigma. They’re not opening up at the time when they should be opening up the most.”

She said K’Bro can help bridge this gap. She bills K’Bro as “the emotional resiliency app that knows you better than you know yourself.”

The app functions as a platform game, a la Super Mario Bros., in which the user navigates a squirrel through obstacles to collect acorns to move up levels. It’s geared for boys between the ages of 12 and 19. In a sense, the game is a way to get boys comfortable with the other aspects of the app.

It also contains a tool for boys to assess their emotions, log and store private diary entries, share positive thoughts about themselves and discuss problems they’re having at home or school anonymously with peers. K’Bro, now in beta testing, is specifically aimed at boys undergoing challenges that may lead to depressive or even suicidal thoughts. According to a 2013 Centers for Disease Control report titled “Mental Health Surveillance Among Children,” between 13 and 20 percent of U.S. children experience a mental disorder in a given year and suicide was the second leading cause of death among kids aged 12-17 in 2010.

“Research has proven that the first time that kids are thinking suicidal thoughts is when they should take an assessment,” said Mack, adding that assessing emotions and sharing problems with peers qualifies as an intervention.

Mack said about 100 boys are using the beta version, which is helping her and her team refine the data before it goes live on the Google Play and iTunes App stores in March. By that time, parents of boys using the app will be able to purchase subscriptions allowing them to receive alerts when there is cause for concern, along with tips on how to talk with their child.

“Parents pretty much stop reading child-rearing books when kids start to talk, but we know from research that the teen brain is very different from the adult brain,” Mack said. “Parents still need help parenting teenagers.”

The idea is that the more boys that use the app, the better the AI-based data model — which Mack said works similar to Siri — will be at predicting emotional well-being, according to Cailin Currie, K’Bro’s clinical trials director.

The assessment tool, called “Am I OK?”, asks boys to assess how they’re feeling about school, their parents and “other stuff” using six good and six bad emotions chosen with the help of an early focus group made up of Mack’s son and his friends. This group of boys also came up with the idea of sharing their negative emotions with anonymous peers who could provide feedback that can then be rated up or down by other peers, something Mack describes as an “anti” social network.

“They liked that there was a safe place to share things anonymously, where their parents wouldn’t see what they wrote,” Mack said, adding that the boys thought the alerts would give their parents “peace of mind without checking in on them all the time.” K’Bro eventually will allow users to report bullying and other “bad behavior” and block other users.

K’Bro could also give parents “more specificity on where to probe” with their child. Eventually, K’Bro will also have the ability to involve family psychologists, therapists, schools, coaches and juvenile detention centers.

The app is expected to eventually carry a feature allowing youths going through especially difficult periods to connect immediately “with a coach who has expertise in adolescent issues,” according to a video on its website.

One psychologist specializing in suicidal prevention in teens and young adults said K’Bro is a compelling app that could normalize emotional assessment in boys.

“Kids are playing games on their phones, kids are texting one another … and it’s taking something they don’t want to talk about but they’re experiencing on one level or another and putting that into something that’s entirely ordinary and everyday,” said Shane Owens, who runs a private practice in Long Island, New York.

Owens cautioned that K’Bro — and social media in general — should not replace face-to-face communication. He also said the alerts should be robust enough that parents don’t consider the app to be a “throw-away tool.”

“This app, in my mind, is only useful if it makes the connections between children and parents, children and schools, children and their peers and children and their counselors stronger,” Owens said, “though, clearly, the path between the child and help needs to be smooth, and this could do it.”

Help One Child, a Los Altos-based organization that works with at-risk youths, particularly those in the foster system, announced this past weekend it would engage 100 of its foster children in a one-year pilot of K’Bro to test its benefits and help refine the app’s data model.

“We see this as a huge benefit, because it puts much more control into the hands of the youth,” said Susan Herman, executive director for Help One Child, adding that many of the children suffer from reactive attachment disorder. “Communication skills are difficult for children with attachment disorder. … What her app does is it gives the child the ability to do that in privacy with other peers … but it also helps the parents then with a communication starter.”

Mack said she is hoping to raise between $500,000 and $1 million to get K’Bro fully built out, with security features, a platform connecting adolescents with professionals and a social media sharing site for parents dealing with troubled teens.

Anyone interested in joining the app’s beta test can do so at the K’Bro website (kbro.io). Anyone interested in becoming an early angel investor can email info@kbro.io.