We all wrote our final exams in June and exams always stress anyone out. This time though, there was the double disaster because of COVID-19 which has plunged us into lockdown. The stress was not healthy. Adding to that, since we all were at home, there wasn’t enough interaction with others who could spot us when we were feeling low so the situation was ever more dangerous. This empowered us to find a solution and Hack The North was an ideal platform through which we would be able to really have an impact with the solution that we proposed.
Lockdowns have hit hard on all of us. Being stuck at home really doesn’t do much good to anyone’s mental health – there is no one to talk to, no one to get help from and none of your closest friends to spot when things aren’t going right. This is fertile ground for mental illnesses and our app seeks to address that. It destigmatises the process of getting help in case you need it by approaching mental health in a fun and enjoyable way. Our game uses artificial intelligence to evaluate the player’s mental health conditions and our chatbot is a helpful pal, always there to talk to you and educate you about what mental health actually is.
We build the game using JavaScript, CSS and HTML. For all the back-end elements of the website we used python and the module we used was flask. For the chatbot we used DialogFlow from Google Cloud and the text editor we all used was Visual Studio code since it allowed us to collaborate through liveshare.
One of the greatest challenges we faced was familiarising ourselves with the DialogFlow interface and figuring out how to customise the chatbot. This was because we had never used DialogFlow before and the learning curve we were on was really very steep. We had also never made a game before using HTML. The only thing we had done that was related to a game that we had made was using Unity and that was completely different. As a result, we had to learn everything in two days – a feat that we are happy that we have managed to accomplish. Building a neural network from scratch was also difficult however fortunately one of our members had experience in it so we were able to do it. However, we doubt if its accuracy is anywhere near the required levels since we definitely not phycologists and neither was there a lot of training data available on the topic. ##Accomplishments we are proud of The major one was being able to make a chat bot that may help some people cope with stress and depression. Another major accomplishment we are proud of is making a simple interactive game where you answer questions related to your mental health and get a simple diagnosis (using a simplified neural net) and suggested help.
##What we learned As we all know in today stress, depression, anxiety are very common problems. By making a mental health chat bot we learned how the ways to cope with mental health issues, we learned how bad mental health affects daily lives of people. The importance of being comforted by someone during the time of stress or depression.
##What is next for mental message We will now aim to expand the app by adding a social platform where people all over the world can interact and connect with each other. This will be sure to help many people improve their mental health.