NWNT · Updated
How was it developed?
The Stressometer was built by NWNT, founded in 2011 by psychiatrist Dr. Sandeep Vohra, MBBS, MD (Psychiatry), who has 30+ years of clinical experience. It was developed in collaboration with the University of Houston in the USA. The aim was a questionnaire that looks beyond symptoms to the circumstances behind them, which is why its 55 questions are organised into five dimensions: Human Nature, Life Circumstances, Clinical Symptoms, Domestic Life and Professional Life.
What does a Cronbach's alpha of 0.935 mean?
Cronbach's alpha measures internal consistency: whether the questions in a scale hang together and measure the same underlying thing, rather than pulling in random directions. It runs from 0 to 1. Values above 0.9 are generally regarded as excellent for a questionnaire of this kind.
An alpha of 0.935 tells you the Stressometer measures consistently. It does not, on its own, tell you how often the result matches a clinician's diagnosis. That is a separate question, which is why comparison with other scales matters.
How does it compare with established scales?
During validation, Stressometer results were compared with three instruments: the DASS, PSS and SOS scales. The DASS (Depression Anxiety Stress Scales) is widely used in research to measure depression, anxiety and stress. The PSS (Perceived Stress Scale) measures how unpredictable, uncontrollable and overloaded a person feels their life to be. The SOS (Stress Overload Scale) asks 30 questions about how far stress has become overload, in two parts: personal vulnerability and event load. Agreement with tools like these, known as convergent validity, is evidence that the Stressometer is measuring what it sets out to measure.
What did the validation study find?
The study was published in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, the journal of the Indian Psychiatric Society, in 2019. In 2017, 100 adults in India took the Stressometer and the three scales: 50 patients of a private clinic in New Delhi and 50 people who had not sought treatment, aged 18 to 74. Each then had a short interview with a psychiatrist or psychologist who did not know their scores, and an institutional review board approved the protocol.
It is one study of 100 people, so its figures support using the Stressometer the way NWNT does: as a first screen that leads to a clinician, never as a diagnosis. Its findings, in the paper's own figures:
- Reliability: a Cronbach's alpha of 0.935 across all 55 questions
- Agreement: the Clinical Symptoms dimension correlated 0.721 with the DASS total, 0.584 with the SOS personal vulnerability, 0.503 with the PSS total and 0.385 with the SOS event load (Spearman correlations, each significant at P < 0.001)
- Telling patients from others: the Clinical Symptoms dimension, a shortened Domestic Life dimension and the SOS event load together sorted 76% of participants correctly (80% of patients, 72% of the others)
- Limits the authors name: a small sample, answers that rest on self-report and the Professional Life dimension left out of the correlations, because 25 patients answered "Can't say" to it
Published research and the patent
The development and validation of the Stressometer have been published in peer-reviewed journals. The validation study is Vohra S, Kelling AS, Varma MM, Prakash A, Khurana D. Measuring reliability and validity of “Stressometer®”: A computer-based mass screening and assessment tool for evaluation of stress level and sources of stressors. Indian Journal of Psychiatry 2019;61(3):295-299. It is open access: the full paper is free to read, and both links are under Sources below. For other publications, or to discuss research or institutional use, write to help@nwnt.ai.
In October 2025, the Stressometer was granted an Indian patent, the first for an AI-based digital mental health screening tool in the country. A patent recognises an invention as new. It is not evidence of clinical accuracy, which is why the validation work above matters more to anyone deciding whether to trust the result.
What a screening tool can and cannot do
A good screen is a well-designed first conversation. It is fast, consistent and available to anyone, and it helps decide who needs a clinician and how urgently. It is not the conversation with the clinician.
- It can show how much stress you are under and which areas of life it comes from
- It can recommend a level of care and help you take the next step sooner
- It can track change when taken again after a few weeks or months
- It cannot diagnose depression, anxiety or any other condition
- It cannot rule out an illness; a healthy result is not a clean bill of health
- It cannot judge risk in an emergency or replace urgent help
Frequently asked questions
- Does high reliability mean my result is always right?
- No. Reliability means the questions measure consistently. Any screen can over or under estimate for a particular person, which is why the result leads to a clinician rather than a verdict.
- Can researchers or institutions read the published research?
- Yes. The 2019 validation study in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry is open access, linked under Sources on this page. For other publications, or to discuss research or institutional use, write to help@nwnt.ai.
- Was it tested outside India?
- It was developed with the University of Houston in the USA, and it is deployed across enterprises in both the USA and India.