Background:

People of working age who live alone increase their risk of depression by up to 80% compared with people living in families, says a Finnish study.A mental health charity said people who lived alone must be given outlets to talk about their problems. Researchers said that living with other people could offer emotional support and feelings of social integration, as well as other factors that protect against mental health problems.Loneliness has a wide range of negative effects on both physical and mental health, including stress and depression.

AIMY:

AIMY is derived from My AI (Artificial Intelligence) Friend.AIMY is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based chatbot designed as a user’s partner, that will engage the user to keep mind off the situation that is troublesome. AIMY will behave as a friendly companion, to which the user can talk to.Our chatbot will listen to the user, convert it into text, then will apply Natural Language Understanding and respond to the user accordingly through speech. Our system will be trained to ask appropriate questions depending upon user's responses.

Features:

By leveraging IBM’s NLU service, AIMY is capable of understanding user’s responses. Each response is categorized based on user’s sentiment and then AIMY responds accordingly.Based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), our system can identify various negative thoughts a user might express. These specific features are mapped into the chatbot as negative intents. Mentioned below are few of the key thoughts AIMY helps users recover from.

AIMY taps into several databases and APIs to extract information for the user. Such features are mapped into the chatbot and are accessed to divert user’s attention from negative to positive. To engage the user in something interesting, AIMY offers various exciting activities such as the following:

Architecture:

AIMY has been built as an android app in the prototype stage. The interface for the user is voice based. So, the user talks to AIMY, AIMY converts this speech to text & sends it to its backend to understand what the user just said. Here at the backend AIMY uses WATSON NLU to understand intents & then drives conversation accordingly using Watson Assistant. It taps into various APIs & databases to move the conversation forward. The result is then sent back to the android app where the user hears what AIMY’s response is. The backend app is deployed on Bluemix while the frontend is a mobile app.

Technology Details:

Existing Technologies:

We explored existing technologies & came across some famous apps such as Talkspace, Joyable, Woebot, and Wysa. While Talkspace & Joyable are ways to connect you to a therapist through an app; Woebot & Wysa are chatbots. They keep you on track while you are in therapy & as such are great to use in between therapy sessions.