LifeXP: Gamified Journalling Chatbot

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Inspiration

Journalling has many benefits, but it is not always an easy process. We often come up with various excuses — I don’t have the time, I don’t have my paper journal with me, etc. Sitting down to write about and wrestle with our deepest thoughts and emotions is also difficult as it can be painful at times. Hence, we sought to create a solution that would provide a convenient, safe, and fun way to journal.

What it does

LifeXP is a gamified journalling chatbot that enables users to pen down their thoughts and feelings anywhere and anytime. Thoughts and feelings are not easily expressed and users might find it difficult to sit down and reflect, therefore, we have chosen to gamify the experience. Through the game, LifeXP reminds users that such introspection is progress in itself, hence gaining life experience (XP) in the process.

How we built it

The bot was created before the MindfulHacks hackathon using a starter pack. During the hackathon, our team designed and developed two new features (CBT journalling and recommended resources). These features build upon the core idea of LifeXP as a gamified journalling chatbot but are largely independent of previous features.

Challenges we ran into

Zoom

Due to the pandemic, we were not able to do the hackathon together in person. Discussing on Zoom was not the most ideal, but we had to make do despite some miscommunications. We had some technical difficulties with recording our video submission, but we managed to find a solution in the end.

Complexity of CBT

CBT can be tedious and complex, especially for uninitiated users. Our main challenge was to work through the complexity of CBT while conveying this information to the users without overwhelming them.

We referenced Cully & Teten’s (2008) “A Therapist’s Guide to Brief Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” and the American Psychological Association to understand the CBT pedagogy and application, and considered their recommendations in our bot.

A bot is insensitive to the nonverbal cues a human counselor can pick up. Without a counselor’s help, we rely on the user to self-diagnose their own automatic thoughts and cognitive distortions. The only way we can make the user’s load more manageable was to break the CBT process into steps while keeping questions as broad as possible. As developers, we strived to balance the number of external resources given and their readability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing and developing a guided journaling session based on CBT techniques and theories, facilitated by a chatbot.

Through this experience, we were able to make new friends and to learn new skills from one another such as creating a telegram bot.

What we learned

The basics of CBT: identifying triggers, automatic thoughts, cognitive distortions, and alternative thoughts

Designing the chatbot around the existing Telegram UI/UX and making full use of the platform as far as possible (e.g. commands, emojis, markdown formatting)

What's next for LifeXP: Gamified Journalling Chatbot

Get more users to try LifeXP so that we can gather feedback and more use cases to inspire new ideas

Explore the possibility of adding chatbots to a group chat for group journalling sessions

Have a leaderboard to introduce a competitive aspect to it; users can compete with their friends to see who can get more XP!
Journalling in a group setting allows a valuable opportunity for friends to affirm each other’s feelings, offer different perspectives or other alternative thoughts