GroundMe

Inspiration

Based on a personal experience.

Dissociation is when a person experiences a range of emotional detachment from immediate surroundings. It's clinically termed as "emotional numbing" and is one of the hallmarks of PTSD. This could often happen as a stress reaction or due to being triggered and feeling unsafe. A person could feel "taken over" by emotion and may experience an emotional and physical shutdown where even doing simple things for yourself could feel like a big deal.

Grounding is an incredibly important skill to help yourself be present and often, it's hard to do on your own, especially when you're dissociated.

What it does

Ground Me is an Alexa skill & Facebook Messenger chatbot that help you go over grounding techniques when you're dissociated / are not in a mental or physical state to think through them on your own.

How I built it

The Alexa skill has been prototyped with the help of Storyline and the chatbot is a messenger bot. I designed all the assets using Sketch.

Challenges I ran into

The Amazon Echo does not work on regulated school wifi "eduroam" so there was no comfortable way to set it up (even after MAC address spoofing and almost destroying my laptop for other reasons). My teammates did not want to participate in the hackathon so they left after the first night.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Did this project on my own. Worked with Alexa for the first time.

What I learned

Learned how to use some cool design tools in Sketch. The Echo does NOT connect to eduroam even after MAC address spoofing.

What's next for GroundMe

1) Deeper guiding through activities like meditation, cooking, etc. 2) Recording notes that could be used at your therapist appointments. 3) Implemented across all major platforms: accessibility

Built With

• amazon-alexa
• chatbot
• messengerbot
• sketch