The Joy Bot | Devpost

Inspiration

In any given year, 1 in 5 people in Canada will personally experience a mental health problem or illness.
Today, approximately 5% of male youth and 12% of female youth, age 12 to 19, have experienced a major depressive episode.
By age 40, about 50% of the population will have or have had a mental illness.

Many of us have experienced feelings of sadness or anxiety. In those moments of loneliness, we all need friendly support. Someone to help us see past the dark cloud in our minds, check in on us, and point us towards helpful resources. Joy is here to help when there is no one else!

What it does

Our website allows you to interact with Joy, a chatbot designed to help you go through moments of depression and anxiety. You can converse with Joy through text messages and let out how you feel; Joy will listen and recommend what you can do in the moment to feel better. You can also access calming exercises, diagnostic tests, and other helpful resources easily through our website. We also have a music player that recommends songs based on the mood of the conversation. Users are fully anonymous. None of their data is collected, so everyone can feel safe while using Joy.

How we built it

Our website was made with React with Chakra UI as our CSS framework. We used Dialogflow to train Joy’s conversation skills, and we connected the API to our backend using Express. Finally, we deployed our website with Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

At first we thought we could automatically train Joy by feeding it data from websites such as Reddit (r/depression, r/anxiety, r/adhd, etc.) and Quora, but we realized that using long and detailed sentences is not the best way to train the bot because the sentences would be too complicated for it to parse and understand the intent. It is better to use short sentences that each convey a different point. Therefore, we had to come up with and manually enter the data by taking inspiration from the above mentioned websites.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are pleased to have created a fully functional tool that will hopefully bring comfort and lend a helping hand to those who need it. Our website is visually appealing, making use of calming music and a soothing colour scheme. Joy is friendly and considerate. We achieved this result in under two days, which makes us hopeful for where we can take this project in the future.

What we learned

By doing research for our project, we learned a lot about mental illnesses and what people who suffer from them go through. On the tech side of things, we learned how to work with Dialogflow and React, as well as how to connect the two together!

What's next for The Joy Bot

We would like to add support for more mental illnesses, so that more people can benefit from our project. Additionally, we also want to train the bot for better and more natural conversation in multiple languages. We plan to integrate diagnostic tests and calming exercises into our website for easier access.

Presentation

View the video of our presentation here! https://youtu.be/JkWSaVtq2A0

Built With

Submitted to

SheHacks V
- Winner Best Domain Registered with Domain.com
- Winner Wolfram Alpha Award

Created by

I worked on the backend. It was a lot of fun to learn to work with Dialogflow to train a chatbot!

Maryam Gohargani
I worked on the frontend. Spacing everything out was a challenge but with the power of flexbox we made it through.

Kana Hashimoto
I worked on the frontend! Making the navbar component and customizing the chat components was fun. My favourite part is the little audio player.

Niveditha Kani
I worked on collecting data from reddit, training the dialogflow agent, and backend express connection. My favourite part is the bot :) It's still a baby, but I'm having fun training it

Naaz Sibia