Madad

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  48 Million people in USA in 2018 suffers Mental Health

Inspiration

A few weeks ago, my batch-mate who was also somebody’s son, somebody’s love, a person with a beautiful heart took his life. Not only him, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 47.6 million people alone in the US in 2018, suffered from Mental Illness and only 43% got the treatment. 57% of people either didn’t have access to resources or didn’t want to share it with another person. Poor mental health is an alarming issue and needs to be fixed. This is where Madad comes in.

What it does

We are a mental health virtual agent which there to listen to you, talk to you, 24x7x365 a year!

How we built it

We used from Facebook Developer Console the product Messenger, where we integrate our NLP model trained so we can provide multiple answers to people that is suffering depression. We also integrate WhatsApp API through the third party Twilio, so we can run the virtual agent in a more private a secure way, since WA is end to end encrypted.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a challenge to maintain the anonymity of the user. Since messenger bot asks you to log in through your Facebook account, it is difficult to maintain the privacy of the user. In order to address this issue, we implemented a WA bot using NLP which only requires you to send a text from any random number and you can talk to our bot without disclosing any information!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team, we are very proud of the skills that all of us have attained in the past 16 hours while trying to develop such a diverse and effective application. From learning about different Facebook Technologies like React, Messenger bot to implementing Whatsapp bot using Language Understanding, each member of our team will be walking away with a strong set of new skills that were attained during this hackathon. We are also very proud of our final product as it is a great, versatile and effective resource that can be used by almost anyone; the possibilities are endless! This is our way of doing our bit to contribute to the community and make it a better place to live in.

What's next for Madad

We will expand it to the next level. Instead of having an imaginary person, in the scenario when the things go out of the scope of the bot, we plan on linking to real volunteer organizations. We also plan to link this with emergency numbers like 911 just in case of extreme situations!

Built With

• messenger
• natural-language-processing
• react
• whatsapp