Convalesce

Inspiration

Over the course of the last two years due to COVID-19 mental health has finally been acknowledged within numerous communities for the first times. As families could no longer visit each other and were confined to just their houses, stress began to increase, tensions within households arose, and lives were lost, people all around the world were affected by the pandemic in their own way. This confinement and lack of freedom has led to an increase in mental health issues around the world, with a 30% increase in adults reporting symptoms of anxiety and/or depressive disorder between 2019 and 2020 in the US alone. With this increase a light has been shone on this overlooked issue and people are coming to terms with mental health being just as important if not more than your physical health.

As high school students ourselves many of our peers (and us included) have experienced issues with our mental health and previously didn’t think twice of them, but with these issues being amplified by COVID we only felt it was necessary to create a product to address this. Our goal with this project was to create something that could address the majority of mental health issues, if not all, such as anxiety, depression, stress, burnout, and eating disorders. We hope to provide an experience which will allow our users to understand what is happening to them, more importantly to understand what the cause of their problem may be and what steps should be taken to address it. On top of this Convalesce should be a place to talk about your problems with no worry of being judged by others or feeling vulnerable, and a place where you can find places to get help and support.

What it does

Convalesce is a web app that hosts a machine learning chat bot and also has a memory bank (depository for phrases/quotes/personalised messages). The chat bot can help you with your mental health issues and give advice, suggest websites, and be a good listener. We even have a 'rant mode' in which the chat bot just listens to the user and the user can just tell the bot how they feel and what exactly is happening. Lastly, it is also a one stop shop for suicide hotline numbers, tests and diagnoses for mental health issues, and websites/articles for cures, symptoms, and causes of mental health issues.

How we built it

We built it using Flask, sqlite, python, json, JS, HTML, CSS. We first coded the chat bot and the memory bank using python and sqlite, we then made the web-app layout using flask and HTML. Lastly, we worked on integrating the two and formatting everything.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we ran into were mainly tasks that took a lot of time, for example the formatting, understanding machine learning, & using sqlite. The main challenge however was working with the chat bot and integrating it into the HTML code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our overall project, as we were able to make a complete web-app within the time frame of a day. We are especially proud of our chat bot and the website in general with how it looks and the formatting.

What we learned

We learned many things, to name a few machine learning, sqlite, flask, and formatting & styling to a higher level using JS and CSS.

What's next for Convalesce

Plans for the future:

• Improve our chatbot to hold longer, as well as basic, conversations and improve its range of responses

• Add the option to upload photos and videos into the memory bank to look at later

• Offer a collaborative opportunity to allow your close friends and family to add messages or voice

  notes for you view at your own discretion

Built With

• css
• flask
• html
• javascript
• keras
• nltk
• python
• sqlalchemy
• sqlite
• tensorflow