BitTherapy

Inspiration

This project was inspired by:

• COVID-19 and the prevalent remote working circumstances
• The increasingly sophisticated technology of Machine Learning in the area of Facial Expression Recognition
• The lack of similar apps available for CBT and mindfulness

What it does

Allows users to:

• identify therapy issues
• reflect on issues (and log these reflections)
• select exercises relevant to their preferences
• enable MoodMonitor with Facial Expression Recognition -> if user is predictively upset, BitTherapy will launch a notification/popup with an activity to help ground the user with mindfulness.

How I built it

Desktop:

• using a web-app wrapper CEFPython to emulate a desktop application and improve migration later on to the web if so desired
• using FER Python library
• using Bootstrap/jQuery for improved design and development speed
• using BeautifulSoup to dynamically load and render data URIs

API:

• Django Rest Framework with MySQL RBDMS

Challenges I ran into

While a lot of the web-based bindings were fairly intuitive, it was quite a learning curve to handle certain edges cases, such as:

• having to render everything as data URIs (and thus intercept and render contextually depending on page)
• multiple threads -> video capture has to run on a separate thread and periodically send events to the UI, which gets tricky as the CEF bindings implement their own multi-threaded logic

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• This was considerably more complicated than most projects I have worked on, but it was awesome being able to make it all work, especially with the ML-driven activity prompts.
• I truly believe this application could help people in their therapy amidst these unprecedented times of isolation.

What I learned

• Next time, to use some sort of package builder like webpack in order to get a better and more efficient workflow going for debugging/designing.

What's next for BitTherapy

I have already have an agreement with a local therapy clinic to demo this product to some of their therapists!

Upcoming features:

• SmartWatch vitals sync
• Therapist sync
• Improved security for accepted level of medical compliance
• More treatment exercises
• Journal page
• Profile page

Built With

• cef
• css
• django
• fer
• html5
• javascript
• machine-learning
• python