What inspired you?
We are international students searching for jobs and this year has been a lot with the COVID pandemic. All of this contributes to a lot of mental strain. People, especially students, don't take care of their mental health either due to embarrassment or nothing having anyone to talk to. This inspired us to create Serenity.
What Serenity does?
Serenity is a chatbot made to converse with users and help them resolve their mental stress. It makes the user have deep breaths, relax, and share their troubles if a friendly way. It also notes the user's anxiety level throughout history which can be perused by him/her.
How we built it
The chatbot is built as a web-application with a minimalistic user interface built-in React.js. The backend server is developed in Flask and the entire application is deployed in an Azure server.
Challenges we faced
With the hackathon being virtual, it was challenging to have discussions and develop solutions. We spent a lot of time trying to debug Microsoft Azure Web-App Bot services which seem to be having an issue during the Hackathon. Setting up a backend database was also challenging.
Accomplishments we are proud of
We are proud of submitting our initial idea of developing a solution to help students and in general people in resolving their mental strain.
What's next for Serenity?
We are going to keep developing Serenity to be more expansive and provide solutions to mental problems with peer-reviewed research to support our claims. There's a lot of scope of improvement in the UI and backend also. The chat conversation can be improved to support various different health issues.
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