MindBridge

Virtually connecting you to a spiritually present therapist.

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Inspiration

As a group of high school and college students, we see a variation in emotions every day. Mental health is a big issue for first-generation low-income students as they have a lot of pressure on their shoulders, carrying heavy burdens and they often don't have people to talk to or have problems with. Leading to a thought to build an interface for students and people of all ages to use as emotional support. We all come from various backgrounds and agree that this is a growing issue that we see even not only in students but also in the elderly when they have no one to talk to.

What it does

Mind Bridge is designed to address loneliness and mental health challenges by offering a range of supportive features. The website facilitates meaningful connections through three main features. First, users can engage in video chats with strangers who share similar interests, fostering conversations about life and personal experiences. Second, before joining group chats, users complete a diagnostic test to identify their personality and interests; they are then placed in groups with individuals who have similar profiles. Finally, our AI chatbot is available around the clock, providing continuous support and guidance whenever users need it.

How we built it

Initially, our team got on frequent voice calls and a few in-person meetings throughout the week to brainstorm ideas, introduce each other's skills, distribute workload, and start building a foundation for our project. After finalizing rough ideas, we outlined our service plan and developed the software to address the front-end and back-end needs. The backend, in particular, will continue to receive updates and improvements. Through time we ran into bugs and issues which we resolved as a team via debugging.

Challenges we ran into

We initially used Replit as our IDE, which led to issues with important APIs, creating a working database using PHP, and other programs needed for integrating artificial intelligence into our project. We overcome these challenges by learning about XAMPP and migrating our code to VSCode using Git and Flow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is most of our team's first hackathon, so we’re proud of this opportunity and how far we got on our first time. We worked with various languages and IDEs through this week which gave us a lot of experience. We had to overcome our challenges and were able to successfully implement a login user base with “Quests” and effectively collaborated as a team.

What we learned

We had an exceptional opportunity to learn throughout the process, starting with integrating APIs for video chatting tools, which proved difficult given our resource constraints. We also discovered the importance of user-centric design, finding that involving users in the development process is crucial for tailoring features to their needs. We are still working on building a user-friendly video chatting feature.

What's next for Mind Bridge

Based on user feedback, we plan to develop existing features such as a video chatting tool, AI chat box, and personalized group chats, as well as add therapeutic tools and personalized self-help resources. We aim to expand our reach by partnering with more institutions and increasing the website's user base. To enhance the AI chatbot experience, we will advance its capabilities with the latest NLP and machine learning techniques. Also, we plan to develop new partnerships with mental health organizations and educational institutions to improve support and accessibility. Using user data and feedback, We will continuously evaluate and refine the app's impact and effectiveness.

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