MindBridge

Inspiration

Good afternoon, we’d like to introduce our App in development “Mindbridge”, built based upon our experiences as immigrants when we first moved to America. The idea is to help refugees and immigrants assimilate into American society without abandoning what they hold dear and while taking into account their mental well-being.

What our app does? We provide translation services that also handles various regional dialects, we also use the suggested voice generation. Libraries so instead of typing in, people can just talk into it allowing for seamless conversation. We will be utilizing google’s text to speech and speech to text libraries, fine tuning on regional data and hugging face’s transformer models to ensure that they are lightweight. This incorporates local expressions and cultural nuances so that the user is not lost holding conversation.

Food recommendations based on their native cuisine, food preferences (if they’re vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian), their allergies. The model breaks down native dishes into basic ingredients and suggests similar American dishes they can try and also gives them the recipes. We are utilizing spoonacular API for the same along with transformer like BERT and content based filtering.

We are also attempting to keep a track of the user’s mental well being considering uprooting your life and moving across the world isn’t easy. We do this by implementing a chatbot that is not for diagnostic purposes but rather an interface for them to talk to and provide recommendations to improve their mental health. The model is a sequence-to-sequence architecture utilizing a bidirectional LSTM encoder and an LSTM decoder with an attention mechanism to enhance the focus on relevant parts of the input sequence during decoding. The datasets used are chosen carefully to reflect real-world scenarios and we have also requested access to a therapist’s documented conversation datasets which was a part of a research conducted in 2019.

App users will also have a feed where they can view threads, topics and events based on their interests and it allows them to connect with other users. Strength in diversity is the driving concept behind this idea. User’s can also share their location and mark themselves willing to help

Another important avenue to assimilate yourself with the locals would be to learn their language, so we also provide short video courses and games (similar to Duolingo) to learn English and to understand local practices and customs from simple things such as ordering coffee.