💡 Inspiration 💡
There are so many health and fitness apps out there but none of them help us overcome the true obstacle to wellness: finding the motivation to do the activities that keep us happy and healthy. We wanted to use insights from brain chemistry to motivate users by explaining why certain activities make us feel good. We focus on the four "happiness" hormones: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin. Each of them account for good mental health and each of them can be boosted with exercise, creative tasks, sunlight, certain foods, social contact, and many other activities and experiences. We use this knowledge to create a causal link in the user's mental model between a certain activity and how it makes us feel by increasing one of these hormones in our system. We think that this more intuitive understanding of brain chemistry is more motivating to people than numerical goals of trying to do 100 push-ups or meditating for 15 minutes.
❓ What it does ❓
We have created a chatbot that helps the user learn how to boost their physical, social, and mental health with an understanding of brain chemistry. The chatbot asks the user how they are feeling and makes suggestions based on the response. For example: If a user is feeling unmotivated, low dopamine might be to blame. The chatbot can tell the user how to increase dopamine with sunlight, food, or music. It suggests specific activities based on the user's preference and willingness to challenge themselves. If a user is feeling really low, the bot will suggest simply opening the window to get some sunlight and fresh air to boost dopamine, or it might suggest a walk outside.
⚙️ How we built it ⚙️
We used vanilla JS and implemented the voice through speech synthesis web API. We added the chatbot to a website using HTML/CSS/javascript. From a design perspective, we created a friendly and conversational voice that is informative but not condescending, encouraging but not pushy, and compassionate but not gushy.
🚧 Challenges we ran into 🚧
On the frontend side of things, it was a challenge to coordinate work on the website because we wanted our website to look cohesive and concise. We also faced obstacles while creating the chat bot but in the end we overcome those problems.
✨Accomplishments that we're proud of ✨
Primarily, we are proud of our project idea. The concept behind the creation of Unwind Your Mind is unique and can prove helpful to people to boost their physical, social, and mental health with an understanding of brain chemistry. We are proud that we could successfully build our project and we believe this intuitive understanding of brain chemistry will be more motivating to people.
👩🏻💻 What we learned 👩🏻💻
Since most of us were beginners we all learnt about various technology from each other while collaborating on the project.
💭 What's next for Unwind Your Mind 💭
We decided this MLH to be a valuable experience and decided to continue working on this project. We tried implementing Twilio but doesn't work for this time. Thus in the future we want to create a more advanced version of Unwind Your Mind.
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