Sam (Mental Health Support Bot Scheduler)

Sam, a bot that decreases the barrier to getting mental health support at your university

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Use it now: https://yoursupportbot.github.io/ *appointments are fake for demo purposes *

Inspiration

In a 2016 survey of students by the American College Health Association, 52.7 percent of students surveyed reported feeling that things were hopeless and 39.1 percent reported feeling so depressed that it was difficult to function during the past 12 months.

We wanted to build something to address this issue and give people the support they need. We wanted to make it easy for people to have a reliable service to schedule mental health services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

It's much easier and makes it more comfortable to schedule an appointment with a bot and makes it more confidential. Everything you say stays stays between you and Sam and those licensed to help.

While we know the human touch is often important, Sam can analyze when someone is in critical need and forward it to a real live trained clinical professional within seconds.

What it does

We envision this as a SaaS application that universities around the country can deploy through a single sign on and the resources can be customized based on that school. Ours was based right here with the resources at Wash U.

  1. Sam gathers your basic information and asks what your looking for.
  2. Sam can suggest what type of resources (Health Center, peer-based groups, sexual assault specialist group) you should schedule
  3. If Sam detects what you're saying is critical, Sam can forward you to live human help all in the same chat.
  4. Sam then presents you with options to make an appointment.
  5. Sam makes an appointment through Calend.ly and sends you a confirmation.
  6. Receive the help you need.

How we built it

Integrated the motion api into our website and framework of javascript and html/css. Motion API: one of the premier artificial chat bot frameworks used by UPS, Kia, CNN and Uber Calend.ly api: used for realtime scheduling of appointments synced with Office 365 or Google Calendars

Challenges we ran into

Training the Motion api Natural Language Processor to know when to hand off to a live clinical support specialist and when to automate appointment workflows.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Live Demo *appointments are fake for demo purposes * Sam https://yoursupportbot.github.io/

What's next for Sam (Mental Health Support Bot Scheduler)

Training Sam to help with automating patient forms and syncing them.

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