The problem Psique solves

A recent estimate by the World Health Organization (WHO), suggests that India has one of the largest populations affected by mental illness. As a result, the WHO has labeled India as the world’s ‘most depressing country’. The first and foremost reason for this is that there is a big stigma around people suffering from any kind of mental health issue in our country. They are often tagged as ‘lunatics’ by society. This leads to a vicious cycle of shame, suffering, and isolation of the patients which makes them reluctant to reach out to a doctor. People are also unaware of what these mental health conditions actually are. In most cases, patients fail to notice they suffer from a particular condition. Thus it is this fear of social stigma and general unawareness that has prevented timely intervention and worsened the condition which has even led to suicides. For instance, suicide is often preceded by a history of depression, stress, or anxiety as with the recent speculation of the celebrity suicide. Our app mainly aims to address this issue.The solution we present is Psique - an app that ensures the mental well-being of users by keeping them calm, positive and stress-free using soothing music, meditative podcasts, and audiobooks all with the feel of mother Nature’s healing touch in forests, oceans and much more. We have implemented a daily journal for users to share their thoughts and feelings on a day to day basis. Users also get to interact with a chatbot friend, whom they can reach out to at times of need when they are feeling low. With the help of the data entered in journal and chats, we track users’ mood and behavior changes by applying sentiment analysis through Natural Language Processing to assess their mental health and set appointments with doctors according to severity. Thus our app solves this problem by facilitating the timely detection of mental health issues and providing a platform for patients to consult doctors without the social stigma attached.

Challenges we ran into

Firstly, this being an online hackathon, we found some difficulty in communicating with each other and finishing our project in this time constraint. We also had issues with the android studio, flutter setup which ate a lot of our time but we managed to resolve those and got into development. Due to time constraints, we are unable to implement everything we planned perfectly. Also, the video chat part could not be shown in the demo because it needs the doctor to accept appointment requests that we send after collecting data from 2 weeks, which is a lengthy process.