MindCare

Design Tree Prototype
Bot Development
Bot Development #2

Inspiration

For our very first Hackathon we wanted to design and create something that was really going to help people, or at the very least have a positive impact on their lives. If we could change one little thing and make it even just a little bit better we were going to be happy. While we were limited by our lack of knowledge with coding in anything other than HTML and we'd never done a Hackathon before we were not discouraged and planned to make a hack that we hoped we could accomplish with our skillet. The idea we decided on involved bettering the lives of those who not only suffered with mental health related illnesses but also those who are struggling to keep their mental health, well...healthy! Whether someone was struggling with Depression, Anxiety or addiction or even going through the grief of loosing a loved one or feeling lost in the world we wanted to help them. To give them a hand to pull them back up when they were down and to show them that no matter what, someone or something was listening.

What it does

CareBot is an interactive chatbot that is part of MindCare’s support and services. When people visit MindCare’s Facebook page, they can message the page and use CareBot in Messenger. By engaging in a conversation where CareBot asks questions to the user about their well-being, information is being gathered to recognize their general feelings (sad, angry, happy, etc.). Subsequently, the questions become more specific to narrow and define the problem. Ultimately, users can be referred to better and more professional resources to take care of their mental health.

How we built it

The Facebook page for MindCare was created with accessibility in mind. With over 2.01 billion monthly active users, it is an effective platform to help people of all ages. Messenger offers a natural conversation and exchange of information, and it is easy to implement the services that CareBot offers to Messenger using Microsoft Azure. In addition, the website was built using Google Sites. It acts as a more insightful hub for resources that support people’s well-being. To build our Chat-bot (CalmBot) we took advantage of Microsoft's Bot Service on the Azure, we used a language recognition bot and are planning to eventually use Microsoft's Cognitive functions to create voice to text recognition as well as a tone analyzer. Even though our bot did not reach a full working prototype it's already learned how to give the appropriate response based on a variety of queries. Eventually we hope to use our Facebook page to host a messenger style bot.

Challenges we ran into

Where do we even start?! Simply choosing where to start was a challenge. Since we were so inexperienced with all types of coding and "tech lingo" we had to climb a pretty steep learning curb in order to get to pretty much anywhere. We didn't let that discourage us from trying though, as we attempted to code a working chat bot from knowing absolutely nothing about the language or the software it used. While we never did accomplish a fully working chat bot, our chat bot CalmBot was beginning to learn key phrases that will eventually help people as we continue this project further than Hack The North.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had already achieved the majority of our goal before we even got here. Between the four of us we only have about a year’s worth of coding experience. And we have never worked with APIs. In fact, we did not even know what that word means. So when we were accepted to this Hackathon we already felt like we have most of our goal. Although, we did not successfully make a working Bot, we came up with an interesting idea and learned a lot of things and talked to a lot of people. In our opinion for our abilities the we did quite well. The fact that we even endeavored to make our bot is quite feat to us. If given the chance again next year we will come better prepared and ready to make something more competitive and even successful.

What we learned

This was the very first time any members of our team participated in Hack the North and the the very first time for three of our members participating in a Hackathon at all! We all came into this Hackathon with very little experience regarding anything. All team members had rudimentary knowledge in some programming languages (HTML, Java, Python etc...) and some had more experience in things like BASIC and HTML but as a whole most of us had little to no clue what anything was. It was the first time we even heard the term API. Over the course of this Hackathon we learned all about API, Mental Health, and a lot about Microsoft Azure and its bot functionality. Even though we didn't get the bot to do exactly what we wanted I'm impressed that we even could do anything with it at all given our lack of experience in Node and C#. Throughout the Hackathon we mostly learned what exactly it meant to be a "hacker" and throughout this amazing experience we learned more about each other, learned new skills and most importantly we learned how to create new technologies and to really try and make a difference.

What's next for MindCare

Primarily, we will finish our bot and will continue to develop its software. Then, once the basics of the bot is complete, we will incorporate voice recognition which understand the tones in the user’s voice to determine the severity of the case. For example is someone says, “I messed up”, then this could be said in a joking way or in a depressed way. Additionally, a step further from voice recognition is making facial recognition. This will allow the bot to see the user's facial cues to better deliver the appropriate reply.