What is our first thought when we hear "health-care"? Is it an illness? Cancer? Disease? That is where we lose our focus from an exponential increasing crisis, especially in this post-COVID era. It is MENTAL HEALTH!
Studying at university, I have seen my friends suffer from depression and anxiety looking for someone to hear them out for once.
Statistically, an estimated 792 million individuals worldwide suffer from mental health diseases and concerns. That's roughly one out of every ten persons on the planet.
In India, where I am from, the problem is even worse. Close to 14 per cent of India's population required active mental health interventions. Every year, about 2,00,000 Indians take their lives. The statistics are even higher if one starts to include the number of attempts to suicide.
The thought of being able to save even a fraction of this number is powerful enough to get me working this hard for it.
Noor, TALKs because that's all it takes. She provides a comfortable environment to the user where they can share their thoughts very privately, and let that feelings out once and for all.
I built this app in these steps:
- Converting all the convolutional intents into a Machine Learning Model - Pytorch.
- Building a framework where users can provide input and the model can output the best possible response that makes the most sense. Here, the threshold is set to 90% accuracy.
- Building an elegant GUI.
Building Chatbots from scratch is extremely difficult. However, 36 hours were divided into sections where I could manage building a decent hack out of everything I got. Work load when working alone was also a stress factor.
I built my own Chatbot for the first time!!! YAYYYYY! Also, this was my first time making an entire hackathon project using Python and its frameworks only. Extremely new experience. I am proud of myself for pushing through tough frustrating times.
Everything I made during this hackathon was something I had never done before. Legit, EVERYTHING! Let it be using NLP or Pytorch. Or even Tkinter for Graphic User Interface (GUI)! Honestly, may not be my best work ever but, definitely something that taught me the most!
Switch from Tkinter to deploying my script into an application or web app. The only reason I went with Tkinter was to try learning something new. I'll be using flutter for app development and TFjs for a web-based application.