How Team Fasalians Built a Wellness Chatbot for RocketGov Hackathon

Partha Roy
Fasal Engineering
Published in
5 min readNov 22, 2022

It was a Saturday evening when Vedant, an aspiring software engineer in our team, pinged us a link, and that’s how we got to know this interesting hackathon was happening, organized by European Commission and rocket.chat. We were already very busy with our jobs, and we got to know about it just 2 days before the event.

However, all of us Vishnu, Vedant, Mahima, Charchit, and myself planned out that we can invest some hours in the night during this period and we will have the weekends to put together our work hence, we registered.

Our friend Chetan also helped us with the brainstorming.

Team Fasalians 👨🏻‍💻👩🏻‍💻 Building Rocket.chat bot for the hackathon

Here’s the official poster of the RocketGov Hackathon 2022,

Idea & Brainstorming

The organizers from rocket.chat held an introduction session where they guided us through the process. Then we understood there are some categories which we can work on —

  • Apps development
  • Bot integrations
  • Omnichannel
  • System Integration
  • Additional challenge

The app development category was looking very interesting to us but as we weren’t quite aware of the SDK and also some of us didn’t have any experience with typescript (needed for building the app ), we decided to go ahead with chatbot implementation.

After we decided that we will be building a chatbot, then we started discussing what exactly we can create.

A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent.

That’s when we tried to think about our day-to-day professional life, and we tried to identify our problems in everyday life. That’s when we identified some challenges like

  • Drinking enough water throughout the day
  • Taking small breaks
  • Forgetting taking medicines
  • Focus & productivity increase

Then it struck us that most of these problems fall in the health and personal wellness space. After the pandemic, most of us are working from home, and it’s really important to be in a proper healthy state both physically and mentally.

So we decided to build a wellness chatbot in the health space which can help us with all these problems.

Galen 👋 — the wellness assistant

The Galen has the meaning of ‘calm’ and ‘healer’. It was the name of the second-century physician who formed the foundation of early medicine.

Implementation

For the implementation phase, we first created a simple document with the functionalities that we wanted from our bot. Basically, it was our software requirement specification (SRS) document, which we were going to follow religiously throughout the process.

Then we started building the architecture of the bot platform. While checking the official documentation we saw two options,

  • Write from scratch
  • Botpress

We didn’t have any idea about Botpress plus we're a bit pumped to do everything from scratch as that would give us more flexibility.

So that’s how we chose the path we were going to take. For the programming language, since we all are javascript developers, it made sense to go with Node.js.

After setting up the initial architecture, we all split up work with one feature for each dev.

The Bot Architecture

A day before the closing date we all sat together, resolved doubts, merged all our code, and tested the bot properly.

The following day early morning we sat and prepared the pitch and the presentations for the epic showdown.

Here’s the GitHub repository,

Features

1. Water reminder

Nudge the user periodically for drinking water, and provides input of yes or no, which can be used to provide a report the next day morning.

User setting up the Drink Water Reminder
Hourly drinking water reminder

2. Feeling Down (Mood enhancement)

Users can message that they are in a bit stressed mood or not feeling quite well to the bot, and the bot will present the user with —

  • Cute heartwarming photos/gifs
  • Jokes
  • Positive lines
Reaching out to the bot when feeling low and the bot replying with a positive line/quotation
bot replying with a funny gif/image

3. Provide Health Information on Demand

Provide the user with a search feature where the user can search for any medical condition and get some clinically approved online articles about that topic from verified doctors.

A user searching for information on neck pain topics and bots presenting articles

4. Take a break reminder

If a user has been online for more than 3 hours then nudge the user to take a break. Depending on the time of the day we can suggest the user do something else ( walking, star gazing, doing small talk, etc )

User configuring the Take Break Reminder
The Reminder for taking breaks from the bot

5. Medicine Reminder

Users can tell when he/she taking meds, now the bot will notify them when the medicine is to be had.

User setting up medicine reminder

Lastly...

So this 1 week's hackathon was super fun. All of us got our hands on rocket.chat which is an excellent platform for communication and we all got solid ideas for creating chatbots plus the adrenaline rush of the competition. It was a great event, learned so much stuff from the sessions, and we had a good time.

This is the perfect representation of every one of us during the hackathon

Thank you team rocket.chat for giving us this opportunity to showcase our skills in this hackathon.

Thank you so much my team for your meticulous work on this project. We could not have done it without you.

Ciao.

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Partha Roy
Fasal Engineering

Full-Stack Engineer 👨🏻‍💻 | ReactJs Dev ⚙️ | Tech Mentor 👨🏻‍🏫