Bandhu

Meet Bandhu! Your assistant in your mental health journey which triggers a wave of positive retrospection inside you.

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Inspiration

On 14th June 2020, a prominent Bollywood star Sushant Singh Rajput committed suicide. The incident was a shocker for millions and made mental health and its related prejudices part of the common conversation. The chaos brought forth by COVID-19 has also not been very favourable to people’s mental wellbeing.

Driven by these incidents and with a motive to contribute something for the benefit of people’s mental health, I quickly cooked up this chatbot Bandhu. Bandhu is a Sanskrit word which means "friend with a connection that links outer and inner world”. Bandhu is primarily based on the book by Stepfan G. Bucher titled 344 Questions.

What it does

Bandhu can cater to a variety of issues like: Happiness, Expectations, Guilt and shame, Procrastination, Decision making, Ambition, Plans, Work-life, Permission, Big steps, Freedom, Greed, Self-hatred, Critics, Purpose, Health, Being Grateful, Priorities, Love, Competition, Scared, Happy Ending, Ideas, Tough times, Suicidal thoughts, Seeking help, Helping someone, and LGBTQ+ mental health issues.

How I built it & Challenges I ran into

To comply with the requirements of the hackathon, Bandhu orchestrates most of the conversation using the Quick Reply feature. Bandhu is an intent-based model which orchestrates contextual conversation.

Two major challenges I faced while building Bandhu were:

  1. Lack of domain knowledge, and
  2. The Act of recreating empathy.

I couldn’t encounter any good resource that could help me curate all possible questions related to mental health. Bandhu’s very limited knowledge relies completely on the book 344 Questions , the mental health website Mind and my personal touch of empathy. Also, a user can ask anything and everything to the bot and intent-based model won’t serve the purpose. But the lack of data and criticality of what the bot utters ensured that Intent-based model is the only feasible option.

What I learned

Creating Bandhu has been a really interesting and insightful journey and most importantly, it has made me more aware of my emotions and mental health needs.

What's next for Bandhu

Being just a week old with a lack of knowledge, Bandhu is not that smart yet. But I can envision endless possibilities by bringing on board some domain experts. Also, I intend to boost the personalization end.

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