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Mind Spa
Inspiration
The life style of an average person has more problems than solutions; majority of them are psychological and due to our behavioral inability to cope up with daily life situations. Mind is the most powerful element of human beings that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences. MindSpa is a habit forming Alexa Skill that helps us understand and leverage the power of mind and cope up with our daily life behavioral issues like Anger, Stress, Low Confidence, Low Self Esteem, Anxiety etc. It helps you monitor and motivates you to resolve your daily life behavioral problems related to Anger Management, Stress Management, Low Self Confidence, Anxiety Attacks and more.
What it does
MindSpa uses a series of questions delivered to the subscribers via Alexa skill. It then uses this data and processes it based on certain algorithm to deliver a relevant voice note in the form of Motivational Quote, Short Story, Audio clip, Practice Tip etc. It regularly checks the progress of subscriber by asking questions at a user- defined frequency and uses the response data to deliver adaptive content in return.
How We built it
Requirement Analysis We started with defining the problem, finding possible solutions that could be easily used by a common man in their daily routine, defining workflows for wizard, wiring the solution with Alexa skill, collecting data for wizard question and voice notes (audio clips, motivational quotes and practice exercises).
Database Design The database design started with ER Diagrams; defining entities like Problem categories, Questions for each category, Types of voice notes, Subscribers, Subscriber’s questions and their responses, Admin defined Algorithms to process subscriber’s response data and attributes related to these entities.
Initial Design Draft We created workflows for user’s interaction with behavior wizard, wired it with Alexa intents, utterances and slots and ran a few prelim use case scenarios. We evaluated the outcome and identified improvement scope.
Brainstorm and Innovate Now we have something in front of us which we could interact with, we refined the intent and its possible utterances by adding more possible values to them. We wanted this to function as close as a human is interacting with its counselor in person. We found few missing in the work flows and some dead- ends.
Improvising Design and Developing the final solution In this phase, we are currently working to plug the loop holes and resolve dead- ends by using a “Refine- Test- Fix and Repeat” methodology. We plan to integrated Alexa account linking for subscriber authentication to enable delivery of relevant and intelligent content for subscribed wizards. Finally, automated background tasks will be setup to process the subscriber’s response and decide what content will be delivered in their next interaction with Alexa.
Challenges I ran into
Getting An Idea The first challenge was to find the right idea that could impact daily life of a commoner and help them form positive habits. We talked to our colleagues at workplace, friends and family in our social circle to see what problems they face in their daily life, before we zeroed down to the idea of delivering adaptive motivational content to combat common behavioral challenges in their daily life.
Gathering Data We then tasked ourselves with another challenge of finding relevant questions to gauge the level of common behavioral problems like Anger, Stress, Low Self Confidence etc. and further to find relevant voice notes in the form of Motivational Quote, Short Story, Audio clip, Practice Tip etc.
Creativity One of biggest challenges while implementing MindSpa was to apply creative inputs in effective handling of user utterances and possible intents. We want our skill to interact with its user as a human counselor would do in real life. This consumed majority of our time and we are constantly working to refine this.
Workflow Changes One of the most time consuming tasks was to create a refined work flow considering best possible interaction with audience and its usability aspects. Infact every now and then we continuously keep refining the work flow to include any possible missing link; and every time we find a scope of making it even better :)
Accomplishments that We're proud of
As of now, we are proud of coming up with this idea to help masses leverage the power of mind to resolve their behavioral complexities and exercise mental well being as a part of their daily routine.
What We learned
It has been a wonderful and exciting learning experience so far and we are enjoying every moment working on this project. In the process we learned how mind functions and how humans can utilize the power of mind to improve their mental well being and manage their behavioral disorders effectively. We also learned how to address this problem and develop a solution using a combination of Alexa Skill, Lambda Functions and LAMP stack.
What's next for Mind Spa
Making the algorithm more effective by implementing data analytics and adding more behavior trackers for personality disorders like alcoholism, depression, insomnia etc. The intent is to make MindSpa a habit forming skill which could impact the daily life of common man.
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