Cocoonie

Inspiration

Cocoonie was inspired by the significant challenges that millions of new mothers face globally during the perinatal period. Limited access to mental and physical health support during this vulnerable time was a key motivator, particularly since 69.1% of women in the US report physical health issues post-childbirth, and 1 in 3 parents in the UK do not seek mental health support. The problem is even more acute in developing countries, where access to resources is minimal​.

What it does

Cocoonie offers empathetic support to new mothers by listening to their concerns, guiding them through mindful exercises, and providing reliable wellbeing resources. It helps users design personalised wellbeing strategies and gives them control over their wellbeing decisions​.

How we built it

Cocoonie was developed through a process involving ideation, conversation design, data scraping, and prompt engineering. The team employed fine-tuning with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and built a user-centred interaction architecture. The development process included model access, training data formatting, and multiple rounds of expert and user testing​.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges encountered during the development of Cocoonie included finding suitable models, fine-tuning the interaction architecture, designing prompts that ensured empathetic and human-like interactions, and managing data formats across multiple examples​.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The team successfully built a chatbot that delivers empathetic support while maintaining high usability, as evidenced by its strong performance in user evaluations. Additionally, they are proud of the personalised, proactive interaction design that empowers users to co-create wellbeing strategies.

What we learned

Throughout the project, the team learned the importance of balancing technical aspects such as prompt engineering with the need for empathetic and human-centred interaction design. Feedback from users highlighted the significance of privacy and the ability to control the conversation.

What's next for Coccon

Future plans for Cocoonie include expanding its language capabilities, introducing voice-first features, adding video content, improving its user interface, and integrating local resources through a resource search API​.

Built With

• brave
• mistral
• nebuis