Yen-Pei Huang, one of the co-founders of the software, said that the number of suicides has grown into an alarming scale, adding that prevention is the only way that families can avoid such scenarios.

“There is currently an exceptionally alarming suicide rate in the world today. We believe that technology plays a vital role in minimizing, if not totally eliminating, the problem. We can help the families of the deranged people to stop them from committing suicide,” Huang said.

Huang, together with Dr. Tiong They Goh, has developed social networking software that would scan people’s webpage in social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

The new software is designed to scan for keywords or catch phrases that would determine if the person is mentally ill or are undergoing depression.

Words like death, want to die, depressed, and suicide are recorded by the software and then rank the risk of suicide from one to 20, depending on the rate of usage of the words.

However, online company NetSafe said that the implementation of the software faces major challenges from different rights organizations, aside from the actual response needed after identifying the threat.

“How can we know that it can actually report the right findings? Does the software know how to read the right terms in needs to look for? And how do we respond to this kind of report?” Martin Crocker, NetSafe executive director said.

But the Victoria University team said that they are now working on technicalities and other problems posed by the software use.

Aside from the questions earlier asked, the team also has to address the question of privacy among users.

It was learned the MySpace.com is already running a keyword search method that would trace possible candidates for suicide.

But website administrators refused to reveal the terms of the software.

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