RonaBot: A Covid-19 parental-stress reduction chatbot

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  RonaBot Logo

Inspiration

For a large number of parents, financial concerns, other worries, social isolation, loneliness, and sadness have had a negative effect on the relationships with their children. Parents must now find a way to meet the growing needs of their children, while also navigating added responsibilities, new worries, and the loss of their support network.

What it does

RonaBot helps parents cope with the added stress resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. RonaBot will help parents learn, relax, and feel inspired for the goal of reducing their feelings of stress. RonaBot can recommend coping strategies, guide parents in actually using strategies, connect parents with information on parental stress and mental health resources. We think a chatbot would be a great tool to combat parental stress, as many parents may feel shame, embarrassment, or fear in disclosing their distress with a real-live human. Robots can be non-judgemental, relay vetted information, track stress overtime, and be the first step in encouraging open discussion of difficult topics for parents.

How we built it

We built it using ChatFuel.

Challenges we ran into

Our team was composed of subject matter experts with limited experience with technology. We had to overcome a very large learning curve to build the prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so grateful to the real-live parents that help provide feedback to guide bot development. We think our first prototype provides a good framework for how RonaBot can help out stressed parents.

What we learned

That with some effort and teamwork, we can learn how to build our first bot!

What's next for RonaBot: your Covid-19 pandemic parenting sidekick

We are excited to continue building RonaBot so that it can interact more freely with parents. We can't wait to be able to offer RonaBot in different languages to service communities that are non-English speaking.

Built With

• chatfuel