Inspiration
Mental Health is a really common problem amongst humans and university students in general. I myself felt I was dealing with mental issues a couple years back and I found it quite difficult to reach out for help as it would make myself look weak to others. I recovered from my illness when I actually got the courage to ask someone for help. After talking with my peers, I found that this is a common problem amongst young adults. I wanted to create a product which provides you with the needed mental health resources without anyone finding out. Your data is never saved so you don't have to worry about anyone ever finding out.
What it does
This product is called the MHR Finder Bot, but its MHR for short. This bot asks you 10 yes or no questions and then a question about your university, followed by your postal code. After you answer these question(if you feel comfortable), it provides you with some general resources, as well as personalized resources based on your postal code and university.
How I built it
I built the chatbot using deep learning techniques. The bot is trained on a dataset and gives you resources based on your answers to the 12 questions that it asks you. I used special recurrent neural network to allow the bot to give resources based on the user's responses. I started by making the backend portion of the code. I finished that around the 24 hour mark and then I spent the next 12 hours working on the UI and making it simple and user friendly. I chose colors which aided with mental illnesses and have a easter egg in which the scroll wheel cursor is a heart. This is also very antonymous as mental illness is a very sensitive topic.
Challenges I ran into
A challenge I ran into was making the UI side of things look appealing and welcoming. Additionally, close to the deadline of the project, I kept getting an error that one of the variables was used before defined and that as a challenging fix but I figured out the problem in the end.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I was proud that I was able to get a working Chat Bot done before the deadline considering I was working alone. Additionally, it was my first time using several technologies and libraries in python, so I was quite happy that I was able to use them to effectiveness. Finally, I find it an accomplishment that such a product can help others suffering from mental illnesses.
What I learned
I improved my knowledge of TensorFlow and learned how to use new libraries such as nltk and pickle. Additionally, I was quite pleased that I was able to learn intents when making a chat bot.
What's next for MHR Finder Bot
Currently, I made two chat bots over the 36 hours, one which is used finding mental health resources and the other can be used to simulate a normal conversion similar to ChatGPT. I would like to combine these two so that when trying to find mental health resources, you can
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