geode

Inspiration

Stigma toward mental health exists in many communities, discouraging individuals from seeking care. Certain groups also tend to have less access to mental health care because of its prohibitive costs. We wanted to build an app that lets users journal their stream of consciousness free from judgment and provides individualized feedback and resources based on their responses.

What it does

geode will take in a user's journal entry about how they are feeling. It prevents the user from modifying their submission to encourage jotting down their unfiltered thoughts. Once the user is finished writing, they can submit their submission. geode will run this through natural language processing (NLP) via Cohere to analyze the submission for certain keywords or phrases that indicate what feelings or struggles the user may be dealing with. Based on its analysis, it will provide feedback to the user about patterns in their entry and recommend advice/resources.

How we built it

We used React as the frontend and Express.js as the backend of our web application.

Using Cohere

The cornerstone of our project was natural language processing, courtesy of Cohere. We use Cohere's classify endpoint to access their pre-trained model and pass in our own text classification categories and examples of text that would fit into those categories. In particular, we came up with three categories of negative mindset issues that might be indicated in a user's journal response: general anxiety, catastrophizing, and low self-esteem.

With Cohere, we pass in the user's written text to the model and see which parts of the text showed these indicators of a negative mindset, then make personalized recommendations to the user based on the output of the analysis. For example, if a user describes how they are feeling worried about an upcoming deadline, Cohere will detect this and classify it as an example of general anxiety. We then use the classifications to recommend ways for the user to manage their feelings of anxiety.

Challenges we ran into

We weren't familiar with React at the beginning of the project, so we took time to understand resources on React and how it could implement our idea! The HooHacks mentors were helpful in giving us tips on how we could integrate our front end and back end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning React and building something we're proud of! We were also excited to use NLP in our project and were impressed by how Cohere made it easy for us to integrate it!

What we learned

React and perseverance!

What's next for geode

Other expansions to geode could include a simple meditation exercise, saving journal entries to see trends overtime, text/email reminders to journal, text submissions of journals to the web app, speech-to-text submissions, etc.

Built With

• cohere
• express.js
• react