Mindly

Inspiration

5.7 million Americans live with Alzheimer's Disease, a progressive mental disorder due to generalized degeneration of the brain. Although there is no cure for this disease, treatment that involves memory practice can greatly reduce its progression. Through our hack, we hope to ensure that the memories of precious moments and loved ones remain intact even in the face of an age progressing brain disease.

What it does

Mindly is an assistant chatbot designed to help individuals with early-stage Alzheimer's remember who they are, give useful information on relatives, appointments and other everyday tasks. The chatbot also provides memory exercises that focus on remembering the names and details of loved ones, recent events, and recent conversations.

How we built it

We built our hack using Google Dialogue Flow, Google Firebase, and Flask. We used web hooks to communicate between our chatbot hosted on Dialogue Flow and the Firebase database hosted on Flask.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, we were going to build the chatbot using Microsoft Azure, but we found it too challenging to learn and implement in the span of 24 hours. We switched gears and worked with Google Dialogue Flow. Challenges we encountered include understanding the Fulfilment framework in Google Dialogue Flow and learning how to deploy, modify and query a Google Firebase database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a chatbot that is catered towards the elderly, a demographic that is largely ignored in the technology space. Our chatbot is extremely user friendly, easy to navigate, and human in its interactions with the user. It can be deployed to a user's phone using services such as Google Assistant (or even be embedded in third-party applications).

What we learned

Google Dialogue Flow, Google Firebase, Flask

What's next for Mindly

We hope to also utilize natural language processing in the future so the chatbot can detect how a user is feeling and cater a response. We would also like to include more memory-based exercises that include videos and interactive games. Moreover, a caretaker option that allows a caretaker to track the location of a user and monitor whether the user has consumed their medicine is a long-term implementation goal.