your mini friend

Inspiration

Mental health is extremely important, especially during this pandemic, where we are all isolated and quarantined. Because of this, many people, especially youths, find themselves feeling completely alone and with a dwindling emotional health. For me personally, I struggled a lot with loneliness and keeping track of my mental health throughout the pandemic, so I wanted to make a simple app which could allow you to "chat" with someone, even if no one was available, and record your moods to find trends in your mental health throughout the days.

What it does

The app has two main functionalities, a chatbot and a mood tracker. The chatbot, because it does not use has any artificial intelligence capabilities, relies on keywords and phrases from the user to respond properly. However, despite this roadblock, I still attempted to make the chatbot as humanoid-sounding as possible, by using vocabulary and a texting style a teen might use or randomly generating phrases so the bot does not repeat the same phrases over and over again.

The chatbot can give encouragement, tell jokes, give self care ideas, respond to the user's negative emotions and rants, and most importantly, give resources for mental health websites and hotlines in different countries.

In the mood tracker, you can simply choose one of the bubbles corresponding to different emotions every day to record your mood, making the process very simple and easy to use. You can also find a record of all your moods in the past days to be able to record the trend in your emotion and mental health.

How I built it

I used Android Studio, with Kotlin, to build the app. As well, being completely oblivious as to how to use the program, I used several online tutorials and some open source code to help me throughout the process.

Challenges I ran into

This was my first time ever creating an app, using Kotlin, and using Android Studio, so to say I struggled would be an understatement. Because I am still an extremely new programmer without much patience, debugging errors and constantly finding and fixing mistakes I had no idea how to fix was quite a struggle. I struggled majorly with fixing errors which were not explicitly highlighted with obvious solutions, especially since I don't fully grasp all the concepts of Kotlin yet. I found an unknown error in the mood tracker too late and could not find the solution, and therefore it is not fully functional in the main app.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very proud of being able to complete this app in the time limit as well as actually finishing most of what I wanted to complete. Even despite the basic design and lackluster functionalities, I am proud of the work I put into it and actually learning a new coding language :)

What we learned

Throughout the course of this hackathon, I learned a lot about the basics of Kotlin and Android Studio to, hopefully in the future, attempt to build more complex programs. As well, I have also learned some unexpected skills, such as patience and time management skills. Because I did this project alone, I had learn to utilise my time best to complete this project in the time frame. As well, I have gained a newfound respect for every single app developer.

What's next for your mini friend

Obviously, I need to fix the problems with the mood tracker, so that it will actually work in the main program. I also want to learn how to integrate AI into the chatbot to truly make the chat more realistic. As well, I would want to improve the overall design of the app. Not only adding more graphics and making the app more visually appealing, but also fixing some UI things that don't function well or that should be added. There are a lot more advanced features of the app, such as possibly a game feature for the app to appeal more to kids, that I hope to add in the future so that this app will be on par with other similar apps.

Built With

• android-studio
• kotlin