Inspiration
Over 5.8 million people have developed anxiety and stress problems, directly affecting their wholistic health. Not only this, but people with special needs often suffer from frequent meltdowns due to an overload of stress. After completing our research, we noticed that there aren't many ways for such people to calm down using calming therapy. That's how NeuralZen was born, our app wants to provide an easy access to simple techniques to calm a person down. We utilize 3 types of therapies in our website that is the one of the most efficient way to effectively destress.
What it does
NeuralZen takes on the responsibility of a personal therapist for anyone who wants to reduce their anxieties. One of the biggest features it has to lend is art therapy. Art therapy provides anxious individuals a creative outlet to express their emotions nonverbally through art. After releasing their initial thoughts in the “Doodle” section, users also have the option to take our “Stress Test.” In this simple assessment, users are told to input what they did in the past week including relevant information. As a result, the Stress Test gives users a rating between 1-4 and some simple tips on how to improve or stay with their rating. If the user wants to find more information about their result or get further assistance they are fully open to our “Mindful Mentor”. This chatbot is trained along with the machine learning model used to create the Stress Test and gives the user further information about their result. For example, if the user has a stress level of over 3. Then the chatbot will be prompted to give them emergency contact information in their nearby area. The user is overall put in an environment where they are fully open to ask whatever they want while staying anonymous.
How we built it
Our website has a frontend composed of Tailwind CSS. We made each of our landing pages(the homepage, sign in page, sign up page, activities page, error 404 page, and doodle page) using this tool. There is a chatbot implemented into the homepage, which we used TypeBot create. This bot is a person for you to talk to about your week and what is stressing you out, the goal to get a soothing answer that will already begin to calm you down. We also implemented a chatbot using ChatBase and considered this as our "Mindful Mentor." Users should be able to input their stress test result and in response will get several detailed response based on their stress test result. Another thing that we have available is our art therapy, which is the best therapy we currently provide. We built this doodle page using the PixelPaper API, which allowed us to create whiteboard where we can doodle. Along with this we have a journaling section where you can write down thoughts to better make sense of them and look at them more logically. We built this using a mix of Tailwind CSS and node.js. Another thing we have is the music therapy. For this we provided a link to a custom classical music playlist that was handpicked by a State-certified pianist. Overall, our website a crockpot mix of APIs, Tailwind CSS, and node.js.
Challenges we ran into
Throughout this hackathon we really one had one major challenge. The idea. When prompted with our track it was difficult to create an idea that satisfied all three of our team members and could actually make a difference in the public health domain. When it came to the machine learning models, TensorFlow and Keras was not working, so the developed CNN was unusable. Instead, we had to rely on a less powerful and inefficient linear regression model. When attempting to delete doodling boards, the requests would not go through. We had to troubleshoot and revise the code to find the solution.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of how our User Interface looks. We really captured that calming, quiet theme that soothes users the second they open the website. We are really proud of the unbiased user base we have selected to help, since anybody, no matter their race, gender, and age, can use this website. Our "Mindful Mentor" is somebody to talk to and soothe you if your feeling very stressed and alone. Furthermore, we believe that our website overall will help the community very well, and will create an easier, healthier life for all our users.
What we learned
At Viking Hacks, we learned many technical things. Some of these things included using Tailwind CSS, incorporating chatbots into our website, and how to use the TfidVectorizer to convert text documents into vector based data. In a broader perspective and through research, we learned about the effects of stress on our health, as well as the commonality of stress related problems in health among our population.
What's next for NeuralZen
The next steps for our program is to collect data and provide therapist and psychiatrist accounts where they can monitor their patients progress and daily streaks. This would allow them to recommend which form of therapy works best for them to destress and live a healthy, happy lifestyle. We would also like to use the data we have and create a database, in order to train an AI model to recommend the best type of therapy. Since not all users will have psychiatrist and therapists watching over them, this AI model would be very helpful with its recommendations. The AI model would also recommend if the patient needs medication for the stress levels, and provide a doctor/psychiatrist to contact in order to get prescriptions for that medicine. We would also love to add more types of therapy, like playing fun games like rock, paper, scissors with an AI, an AI generated crossword puzzle with infinite versions, or Tic Tac Toe with AI. Overall, we aim to make NeuralZen as a legitimately spread product that efficiently provides calming therapy represented by therapists.
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