Mood Tracker and Support Chat

Real-time health tip notifications to dashboard based on current mood data using Ably
Patient chat with professionals online/offlien status using Ably's 'presence' feature and React SDK
Professional's chat leveraging Ably's React SDK
Ably's statistics help us to track real-time messages, channels and many more.
Ably's visual charts

Inspiration

The alarming rise in the mental health issues made me develop a solution to provide immediate support to the persons with mental health concerns. Though numerous support chat applications exist, most of them rely on backend which might delay responses. This made to work on Mood Tracker and Support chat using Ably's real-time features.

What it does

The application can track patients current mood and provide instant health tip(tip generated by openAI) using Ably's real-time publish feature which doesn't expect manual page refresh to display the health tip on the patient's dashboard. The other important feature is real-time chat support with healthcare professionals. Ably's presence feature used to detect healthcare professional's online status and notify the patients in the chat window which can give comfort to the patients that someone is available to care.

How we built it

This project was primarily built using React, leveraging Ably's React SDK and its real-time features. The real-time chat between patient and health care professionals was implemented using Ably's publish and subscribe features. The presence feature enabled me to detect professional's online status. One of the important advantages of using Ably's SDK was eliminating backend to handle chat message storages. Ably was able to handle everything in frontend itself. For the health tips, integrated the OpenAI to generate content, which was then seamlessly delivered to patients in real-time using Ably.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, I have planned for backend setup for chat storages. But leveraged Ably's React SDK and its real-time features and handled the chats and storage in frontend itself. Also Ably's Real-time publish feature helped to display the health tip in the dashboard without the need of manual refresh which was one of the initial concern.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implemented real-time interactions without backend
Instant health tips without the need of manual refresh.
Implementing real-time presence feature of Ably's to detect person's online status.
Handling chat storages within frontend using Ably's history feature.
Was able to collect metrics using Ably's real-time statistics. Overall, felt very easy to integrate Ably's SDK to develop real-time applications.

What we learned

Integrating Ably's React SDK and its real-time features/functions for the first time, but it made the code less to implement the real-time chat functionality
Learnt how to implement real-time functionalities using Ably for this mental health support solution.
With various Ably's real-time features, able to handle the user experience using presence feature, fast chat responses leveraging Ably's frontend capabilities.
Ably's metrics gave the insights for optimizing real-time interactions, understanding user engagements and to ensure it provides scalability for growing users.

What's next for Mood Tracker and Support Chat

As I move forward, I plan to make this as a real-time interactive tool by adding real-time Mood Analytics. So patients and healthcare professionals can review mood over time. Also planning to implement AI integrated chat functionality to respond when the healthcare professional is not online which will enable 24/7 real-time support. Additionally, we can enhance the health tip by providing personalized tips based on mood history and chat history of the patient. Also, we can feed the mood tracking data to machine learning models to generate better solutions for mental health issues using Ably's real-time features.