Haven

Haven is an app designed for users who would like to talk about their feelings with someone anonymous, therefore creating a safe space for them to be able to share their thoughts.

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Inspiration

When tasked with creating a design to service and empower the black community, our team was inspired to work with mental health. According to Mental Health America, over 6.8 million people that identify as Black or African American has a diagnosable mental illness in the past year. There is a lot of stigma surrounding talking about mental health concerns, but it is crucial to speak with someone for your mental health.

What it does

Our app is designed to provide a place where users can be heard without talking to someone. Users have the option to text or talk to the app and through the use of natural language processing and google API and sentiment analysis, the app will output a tailored response. Using the user data, the app will examine a series of mental health databases and useful information to suggest applicable resources.

Our purpose is to help users tackle mental health stigmas, in their own comfort. While it’s daunting or expensive to contact mental health care workers, we provide the user with access to an affordable, convenient, and welcoming safe space to get in touch with their thoughts. Haven is your friendly, funny, and nonjudgemental voice to voice therapy chatbot who serves to gives the user a comforting and healing experience.

How we built it

We built the app prototype using front-end software. Some back-end was done using Python and dictionaries, but it was difficult to incorporate databases in such a small timeframe. We used HTML and CSS to build the Haven website and used DialogFlow to set up our voice integration of natural language processing.

Challenges we ran into

We faced difficulty when trying to use the Google Cloud API Dialogflow as we never used it before and did not know how to get the output we wanted. Through collaborating together as a team, patience, and speaking with the Google mentors, we were able to figure out how to use Diagflow and get the output we wanted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this was our first hackathon for the majority of our group, we were very proud of our efficiency and process. We believe our work is a clear demonstration of the values we hold important. Our project is the output of hard work and collaboration and demonstrates the importance of mental health. We are most proud of using Google Cloud to set up the chatbot and its ability to respond to stressed and/or anxious inputs.

What we learned

How to use Google API and specifically Diagflow. How to work together as a team to face problems and challenges that we don't know the solution to. Strategies to learning a new API, concept and implementing it.

What's next for Haven

As mental health is a very sensitive topic, it is inherent that our next steps are to look at different databases and research on suicide prevention. If the app detects any suicidal tones from sentiment analysis, we want it to recommend suicidal hotlines immediately and connect with trustworthy authorities. As well, we want to implement a subscription box including student and low income discounts for better accessibility. Originally, we wanted to provide a space where users can connect with others that are feeling the same way through machine learning. However, more research needs to be done. Finally, we have to finish the back-end design of our app and market it through instagram and youtube sponsorships.

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