Evelyn

What is Mental Health?

This is our emotional, psychological and social well being and if not taken care of it can affect your physical health. According to the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health, 1 in 4 people will have a mental health disorder in their lifetime and this can occur at any age.

With our fast pace world, most of us do not realize we have mental health disorders and we may not have access to resources and facilities such as a professional therapist.

What if we can change that?

The invention of artificial intelligence has caused the popularity of chatbots to increase and many companies are beginning to included chatbots in their services such as the help desk for many websites.

A report by Grand View Research Inc., U.S. based market research and consulting company, found that the global chatbot market size is expected to reach USD 2,485.7 million by 2028.

According to Forbes, 60% of millennials have used chatbots and 70% have reported positive experiences with using them. As we can see, the chatbot industry has witnessed significant growth and popularity. Furthermore, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies can greatly enhance the features and relevance of chatbots in a variety of areas such as business and health sectors.

We believe that chatbots designed for people suffering with mental health issues can serve to be valuable to society and the industry and can be accessible to everybody. One way chatbots can be used is to improve access to mental health care services. Mental health chatbots can offer an alternative and supporting pillar to costly human-based mental health interventions. A review of mobile chatbot apps for anxiety and depression conducted by Ahmed et al. (2021) found that patients generally had overall positive perceptions and opinions towards chatbots for mental health.

Thus, we decided to create Evelyn, a discord chatbot designed for mental health

What can Evelyn do ?

Evelyn can respond to you when you call out to her and offer to help you.

If you express feelings of depression and anxiety, Evelyn is there to give you tips and advice on how to cope with your Depression or Anxiety !

She will also provide resources to professional services.

How we built her?

She was built using Python and the Discord API. We created a server in order to test our bot.

What Challenges we faced ?

We faced challenges in making the conversation seem natural and making our chatbot respond to a wide variety of user inputs. We also had problem with the Discord API.

For the future, it would be worthwhile to attempt to transform conversational user inputs and use intent recognition and model training to come up with a more responsive and valuable chatbot. We would also like to improve the bot to allow it to be used in more practical situations in future such as allowing users to vent out their feelings, etc and the bot would return an appropriate output. We also hope to port the bot to other applications and make it more accessible to people

What did we learn?

This was our first time working with Python. We learned basic Python syntax for writing functions and coding. We also learned loops and if else statements which served to be valuable in the creation of the bot. We learned about async/await to write concurrent code. We learned basic git commands like initializing , committing, pushing and pulling a repo.

References https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666990021000112 https://www.urbandesignmentalhealth.com/facts-and-figures.html https://www.everydayhealth.com/depression-photos/ways-to-cope-with-depression.aspx https://www.verywellmind.com/tips-for-living-with-depression-1066834 https://adaa.org/tips https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/how-to-cope-with-anxiety#quick-coping-methods

Built With

• apis
• python