The problem SenPal solves

It is aptly said that ‘Caring for our seniors is perhaps the greatest responsibility we have. Those who walked before us have given so much and made possible the life we all enjoy.’ And as the youth , its our shared responsibility to cater to their new needs.

The needs which arise with old age, reducing learning capacity and advancing technology. It must have happened numerous times when our grandfather or grandmother would have struggled with adopting WhatsApp or searching on chrome or as simple as searching a bhajan or movie on YouTube. They time and again need assistance to get at ease with the interface and need help to operate them. Keeping this view in mind, we made ‘SenPal’, a telegram chatbot which assists senior citizens and caters to their day-to-day needs in few simple textual exchanges which gives them options for medical consultation, listening to bhajans, songs, news, watching movies, shopping, etc.

Challenges we ran into

The journey of making this project has seen a lot of ups and downs.
The first major challenge was to observe and dig up a real life problem which we passionately wanted to solve. After deciding on the problem statement, we went through rounds of discussions to decide on how to implement it and make it easy to use for the target audience. We opted to go for making a chatbot and faced issues in its development. It was quite a task to decide which chatbot to make. We tried searching from chatbots of telegram to that of WhatsApp. The other hurdle was to decide the language to build the project in and chose python language and learnt it from scratch as we weren’t experienced in it. Then we went to scan through numerous websites to know how we can Connect different websites to this chatbot. But then realized that it will not solve the problem at hand that is the elderly will have to be taught to operate those websites thereafter. So , we came to the consensus of connecting chatbots of different features like that of YouTube and medicines.
There were numerous trials and errors while coding it and instilling the desired functionalities but at last we did it!. From nearly settling for options of ‘NO Code’ chatbots to finally building a ‘Coded’ chatbot from scratch , it was quite a journey.