Inspiration
Drawing from our personal experiences, we were very insistent to develop an app along the lines of mental health and wellness. While the feeling of having a one on one conversation with an actual therapist felt quite real, it also felt difficult to release our authentic emotions. Being a millennial in a world that is inclining towards technology and artificial intelligence, we felt that a virtual conversation with a bot-like therapist would feel more comfortable, judgmental and relieving. Keeping that in mind, we proceeded to develop an app that relies on the virtual therapist named Kiara to coerce us to converse and make us realize the solutions to our problems on our own.
What it does
Our app offers electronic therapy in two unique forms: one through our virtual therapist Kiara and for those less inclined to opt for the former, we designed a chat room where like minded individuals could get together and empathize for each other, knowing that they’re not alone in their struggles.
How we built it
After a long period of brainstorming and talking to mentors, we came up with the idea of creating eTherapy using iOS. Despite being completely oblivious to the syntax and style of Swift, we went ahead with programming the app using Swift on xCode. First, we created a tentative storyboard and then worked on the specific aspects of building the app. In order to make the virtual speaker, we started off by working on the text-to-speech conversion aspect and then moved on to develop the speech-to-text aspect which proved to be quite interestingly challenging. Having spent most of our time figuring that out, we moved on to enhancing the user interface and simultaneously working on the actual questions and answers aspect of the app. Lastly, we worked on the chat room to develop it as best as we could.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge that we ran into was the fact that in our code, Swift would not allow more than one text-to-speech conversions which proved to be a huge hurdle since our app was supposed to be a continuous dialogues and preferably a long conversation, however, we were unable to fully solve the bug in the hack duration. A few other minor challenges that we faced also include the use of wit.ai to develop the conversation dialogues but since RapidAPI could convert closes to Objective C, we encountered problems in converting long chunks of code from one language to another. We also spent quite a large portion of our time learning Swift, in the first place.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re really proud of the fact that we worked extremely hard through the entire night and never once gave up despite downs and lows. For our first ever hackathon and complete inexperience in the field of both apps, Swift and iOS, we feel extremely proud of each other and very pleased to have each other’s support through the entire hack. We’re glad that we got most of the program coded and despite a few potholes still in the app, we have its basics up and running. And most of all, we’re extremely proud that we created an app that we feel so closely and strongly about and one that can actually be of help to a lot of people.
What we learned
Most importantly we learned swift language using xcode. All the team members were new to this language. So this was a great learning platform for us. Moreover, this was our first IOS app, we learned how to put everything together, the code and the story.
What's next for e-Theraphy
Nextly we want to improve the chat room by including professional therapist. Work on the text to speech aspect of our code and also improvise on the questions the virtual helper asks. We want to include more support group and add spiritual aspect to the app. Furthermore, we want to reach out to as many shy and closed minded people that might not feel too comfortable with the idea of confiding in someone because we know what it feels like to be in their place and we’d like to be of as much help as possible.We will also add the capability of tone recognition and suicide recognition to predict suicide and other harmful potential diseases such as bulimia and anorexia.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.