Jorge the therapist

Annie kim, Ruby Hone, Mia Pham, Linh Nguyen

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by Jane, a friend of one of our teammates, who experiences frequent panic attacks. Along with her struggle, we realized that many of our friends were going through similar problems. The mental health challenges among youth are prevalent, especially for college students who face intense academic, social, and personal pressures. Thus, we wanted to create a tool to provide support and comfort during moments of distress. We also identified the problem that the person who witnesses other people’s panic attacks finds it difficult to offer effective support. To address this, we incorporated a guide on how to assist someone during a panic attack, providing practical steps to help them cope. Regarding the chatbot character we designed, we were inspired by Jorge, the mascot of Mount Holyoke College, which is also one of the MHC students' favorite things on campus.

What it does

When the users enter the landing page, they can click on the “Hello, I am Jorge. What can I help you with today?” bubble to see the drop down for the options and choose the option they want.

When the users choose “Emergency”, our web-app offers instructions for the Breathing and Grounding exercises, which are two very effective exercises that ease anxiety and help people suffering from panic attacks regain calmness. Users can choose between “I need help”, which provides direct instructions on the two exercises, or “I want to help a friend”, which guides them to instruct another person through the activities. Calming music will also be automatically played during the instructions.

When the users choose “Chat with Jorge”, the web-app directs the user to a chatbox. The user can talk to the AI Chatbot as a way of expressing feelings, thoughts and emotions privately without fear of receiving any judgments. The AI Chatbot can also give advice and reassurances depending on the needs of users. After chatting, the user can click “” to answer a short questionnaire about their preferences on places/ scenery. Depending on the user’s chat history and their answers to the questionnaire, our web-app will then recommend a suitable place and display a live 360 view of it to the users.

On the landing page, mental health-support resources from MHC’s Counseling Services Departments are also linked. These include Drop-in talking, Tea time, and Medication Consultation.

How we built it

We built our app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front end, with Node.js for the back end. For the chatbot, we integrated OpenAI's GPT-4o model through their API. Additionally, we utilized Google Street View's Static API to display relaxing locations for meditation. We collaborated on the project by sharing our code on Repl.it.

Challenges we ran into

We had a limit of two people in Repl.it that could collaborate, so we had to be in pairs. We faced a lot of difficulties when using the API keys. Once, we couldn’t identify why the error was happening, but we found out that the key was expired. Also, saving the key in .env file made errors sometime because of security issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We take pride in actually making a practical effort to help our friends and other people who currently struggle with their anxiety/high stress levels. We are also proud that we know how to communicate with each other, assign the workload, learn from the coding experience of our teammates and can finally come up with a product together.

What we learned

We learned to be patient and considerate when we code. Instead of rushing everything and making mistakes because of it, we should slow down and think carefully before starting writing.

What's next for Jorge the therapist

We’re aiming to develop more attractive designs to make the website become more visually appealing as well as to modify the features for the website to be more visible on other devices like Iphone, Android.. Another thing that we’d like to improve are the Place recommendations functions and the Emergency functions. We’d want to add more questions when giving location suggestions so that the options given out can be more personalized for each user. For the Emergency function, we’d like to add more animations and interactive features to each instruction since that function is currently mostly text-based. Additionally, we also plan to add a new function called Streaks (like in Duolingo) that can count the number of users’ daily access and give out notifications each day that tell users their Streak status, congratulating them whenever they reach a round-number streak (10,20,30 days..) or remind them to update their daily mood as well as give out positive quotes per day. Last but not least, we aim to expand our target users to students of all the Five-Colleges.