💡 What Inspired Us
Our inspiration came from the growing need for personalized mental health support. While AI-powered mental health solutions exist, they often lack the human touch and adaptability that professionals provide. We wanted to create a platform where medical professionals could design AI companions tailored to their patients’ needs, ensuring AI support aligns with expert guidance rather than being a generic chatbot.
🏗️ How We Built PikNik
Our project, PikNik, is an AI-powered platform that enables medical professionals to create custom AI companions for their patients. The goal was to combine AI-driven interactions with professional oversight to improve mental health care.
Tech Stack
Since we were comfortable with PHP, we built a PHP-based backend, using JavaScript, HTML, and Tailwind CSS for the frontend. Our project leveraged:
- ChatGPT & Gemini API – for AI-driven conversations
- MariaDB – for securely storing patient and professional data
- Whisper AI – for speech-to-text functionality
🔥 Challenges We Faced
- Time Constraints – With only a few days to build a working prototype, we had to prioritize features and streamline development.
- Balancing AI & Privacy – Ensuring patient safety and data privacy was a major challenge. We had to carefully design secure and ethical AI implementations.
- Next.js Struggles – Initially, we wanted to use Next.js, but learning it on the fly proved too complex. Instead, we pivoted back to raw PHP for efficiency.
- Networking & Presentation – As developers, we usually focus on coding, but this hackathon pushed us to engage with industry experts and present our ideas effectively.
🎉 The Rewards
Participating in the hackathon was an incredibly rewarding experience, but what made it even better was:
✅ Our team won the networking Bingo game, which encouraged participants to connect with each other.
✅ We received mentorship from industry experts and scholars, helping us refine our ideas and focus on what truly mattered.
🙌 Final Thoughts
This hackathon was more than just about building a project—it was about learning, connecting, and pushing our limits. We are truly grateful to the organizing team for putting together such an impactful event. This experience has motivated us to keep improving, exploring new technologies, and working toward making a difference in the tech space.
AI Generated Markdown. Only to be used as a reference, not an official claim of any sort.
Built With
- css3
- gemini
- html5
- javascript
- mariadb
- php
- tailwind