ConU III - helping old people since 1999
Mental health is often put behind physical health, and with the senior population, that prioritization is even more prominent. Thus, we wanted to target the largest source of negative impact on the mental health of the aging population - loneliness.The focus is placed on mental health because of the vast resources and advancing technology for many physical illnesses, but not enough one-on-one support for what matters - human interaction.On the other hand, a lot of what is connecting the younger generation together is social media, which due to the lack of technological literacy, the senior population may not integrate into such systems as well due to many reasons including vision impairment, lack of learning resources, and lack of interest. Thus we also integrated the use of text to voice and voice to text, as well as emotion voice detection into our project - Clarety.
This app that is centred around the older user integrates simple UIUX with AI communication to bring support for mental health of the senior population. Its main function acts as a daily check-in for the user to communicate with. Catered to all accessibilities, the user can communicate with our bot - Clare to speak about their daily lives - not only mental, but also physical health. This data is then compressed at the end of the day to track mood trends and determine severity of any problems the user is facing. If the user or a caregiver inputs contact information of loved ones into the app, it also has a features to contact these people as a source of interaction for the user, as well as emergency contact, which can be accessed without a profile for any further needs. Beginning with user research, we created potential solutions to our problem space by creating user stories, and wireframes to spot any accessibility issues. After landing our proposed solution, we began creating screens for various scenarios using Sketch and Adobe Creative Cloud. We then brought the interaction together by connecting screens using storyboards on Swift. Meanwhile, we learned a lot about APIs, voice to text, and IBM's Watson technology, and integrated the tools we were given to train a female bot named Clare to respond to various health concerns and contact commands. We also engineered an emergency system accessible to any senior in the vicinity of the app. To bring both front end and back end together, we integrated the storyboard and functioning code in Swift. Lastly, Being first time hackers, we had no clue where to start. The three of us had done our separate ways before - design, front end, and back end. But tying that all together along with using a handful of new technologies we were unfamiliar with brewed a rocky 24 hours.Aside from technicality, it was hard to do the extensive research that we would have wished to do due to the time constraint and the limited sample population in the area. Having to see accessibility issues and potential scenarios from our user's perspective was also a challenge.
What hackathons are made for and what we take pride in is in our concept. Physical health is undeniably important, but we wanted to bring attention to what usually is put at the backseat - mental health. This is a serious issue in the ageing population, especially in the rise of digital communication in a medium our users are not familiar with. Our technology brings together the accessibility of a digital product with the importance of check ups, as well as the intelligence of machine learning to provide a clear platform and road to mental health awareness in seniors. What's next for Clarety The main goal for Clarety is to become and Amazon Alexa skill in order to be properly integrated as a voice platform for an even more seamless user experience. With more households, especially the older population wanting support from a smart home system. Clarety on such device would provide better accessibility and availability of its functions for our users. In addition, for better resources, we hope to partner with mental health professionals to analyze the encrypted data (privacy is important to us) for better prediction of any emotional or mental health problems. Providing an easier and clearer solution for seniors is the mission of Clarety team.