Ambrosia

Background

According to HealthLine, 1 in every 4 college students suffer from mental illness, 44% of college students report having symptoms of depression, and 75% of college students do not seek help for their mental health problems. Mental health problems, such as depression, are a rampant issue that affects many individuals. In my case, I personally know that three of my friends are suffering from depression. They sometimes talk about how they cut themselves to relieve stress and honestly, I am thankful that my friends believe in me enough to confide in me their problems. However, I'm worried about the others that keep it inside. They refuse to visit the campus Counseling and Psychological Services because of the societal stigma associated with mental illnesses. They refuse to tell their friends because they don't want to seem weak in front of others and are afraid of being judged. As a result, our team decided to create a hack to help out our fellow students suffering from mental health issues.

Project Functionality

Our project is a simple Android app that involves talking to an AI. The user is able to talk to a unbiased AI about their problems without fear of being judged by their peers. Their inputs are analyzed through Watson's Natural Language Understanding API and we will refer them to psychiatrists in severe cases. The AI is specially geared towards listening to the user and encouraging them to talk about themselves and their problems. It tracks what the user says and tries to tell if the user has any mental issues that may need diagnosing. In those cases, it refers the user to nearby doctors. It can also detect emergencies and respond appropriately.

Conclusion

Although we tried as much as possible to make the app human-like and realistic, it was a difficult task and still needs work. If we had more time, we would have implemented machine learning to have Ambrosia improve her ability to communicate with the user as if she learned through neural networks. This would have made Ambrosia much easier to communicate with. Overall, we are still proud in the progress we made in natural language processing, AI communication, and in our potential ability to assist in the mental health status of many affected individuals.

Built With

• c++
• cmake
• java