shrutix/care-companion

NLP-based Chrome extension that detects emerging / worsening mental health issues through online behavior. SM Hacks II runner up. (outdated code)

Care-Companion

SM Hacks II project

a chrome extension

Inspiration

Seeing some of our closest peers suffer from mental illnesses, we discovered that mental health, mental illnesses, and the stigma around them are an apparent issue in society today. By creating this app, we want people to be open to getting help who may not personally seek it out themselves as they may not be aware of the illness, or are suppressing it because of the constant social pressure and stigma around the illnesses we face in society today. We want to make a change in some of the most apparent issues in our community, and mental health is the one we feel most passionate about.

What it does

Care Companion is a Chrome extension that can be downloaded by anyone and can track a user's real-time searches and search history. Thus, when triggering phrases regarding mental health are detected, a pop-up appears that include hotlines and resources an individual may need at that certain time. If an individual is going through a hard time, they may not seek immediate help and may often resort to the internet to find help. With this extension, we make it easier for immediate help before someone puts themself in danger.

How we built it

The main interface was built using Javascript while the front-end runs on HTML and CSS. The UI and logo were created in Sketch.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had prior experience in web development so it took us a while to get down the basics and then build on that. We didn’t know if we could possibly use cookies to look at people’s search history over a long period of time, or look at their history from specific websites other than google search. Our original plan was to train a machine learning model to detect various signs over longer periods of time, but however we realized that that would take a long time and could not be completed in the span of 24 hours. Also many times, the extension did not run in the browser.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to build our extension using JavaScript and figure out how to create a popup within the web browser.

What we learned

We learned how to make a google chrome extension which we weren’t aware of how to do beforehand. We had to look up many tutorials and refer to a wide variety of tutorials and articles online to do this as well as using the support from the awesome mentors!

What's next for Care Companion

We hope that this chrome extension is implemented at schools as it can be the future for decreasing the onset of mental illnesses in the community of young teens. Our previous plan was to integrate a machine learning model to detect trends and patterns of a user’s searches, which we now hope to add in the future.

By Jennifer John, Shruti Janardhanan, and Sarah Mughal