Manobal (मनोबल)
Be kind to your mind
I recently participated in Hackon 2.0, a global hackathon inviting people from around the world to provide a solution for mental health and awareness. I and my team came up with an all-inclusive application that entails many features that have been scientifically proven to relax a person and provide calm. I will deep dive into this in this article.
Click here to view the project page.
What is Manobal?
Manobal is your happiness buddy which will help you to tackle anger, stress, anxiety, depression, and heartbreak. It’s empathetic, helpful, and will never judge you. In times of loneliness, the AR buddy will make you feel wanted and heard. Manobal is a Hindi word that translates to “morale” or “spirit” which seems apt for this project.
Inspiration
A healthy mind is as necessary as a healthy body. Especially in this pandemic era, many people have had great mental suffering, which makes it even more important to focus on mental health. This is where Manobal can help bring a change.
The Problems we faced and our approach
Understanding human psychology and create a solution that can improve mental well-being based on that is no easy task, especially for engineering students who have no background in psychology. We took our time scouring the web and studying up mental wellness applications to come up with a solution.
We thought: “What if we can play relaxing music for someone who wants to sleep, play meditation routines for someone who wants to meditate, create a virtual friend for someone who wants to talk his/her heart out to someone?”
Can it be done? The answer was a solid YES.
Mental Health 101
After some understanding of mental health and wellness, we can summarize it as follows.
Mental health refers to cognitive, behavioural, and emotional well-being. It is all about how people think, feel, and behave. People sometimes use the term “mental health” to mean the absence of a mental disorder. Mental health can affect daily living, relationships, and physical health.
Mental health can be affected by:
- anxiety
- pressure
- stress
- heartbreak
- sleeplessness
- loneliness
To counter these and/or prevent them, one should be mentally strong and confident. This can be achieved by:
- calming your mind
- meditation
- sleeping
- talking to a close friend/family
Features
- Virtual Friend — The major highlight of the app is its virtual friend feature where a person can talk to an augmented reality-based bot at times when he feels lonely or depressed. One can share whatever he wants with the bot and it responds accordingly.
- Helps people in overcoming sleep issues, anxiety, loneliness, stress etc.
- Teaches you how to meditate, survive heartbreak, and tackle exam pressure.
- There are meditation drills, different sleep sounds and visualisations to help one relax.
- SOS feature to share a message with friends or family in case of panic attacks.
Your Virtual Friend
Although many intermediary ideas came and went, one was there from the beginning and it was that we have got to include Augmented Reality(AR) in this project. AR can improve the UX of an application to an extent that the normal 2D elements of a UI just cannot.
So we decided to add an AR bot to our application that you can talk to like a normal person (it even looks like a normal person). It will listen to you and respond empathetically. It is programmed to be gentle and gives answers to clear your negative thoughts.
The Hackathon Experience
We had a great time at Hackon 2.0. The event was full of great workshops, a few surprises here and there, and an overall amazing experience. It saw the unexpected participation of a whopping 8k participants from around the globe. The organizers and volunteers were very active the entire time. I would highly recommend future HackOn Foundation hackathons.
I would also like to give props to the HackerEarth platform for the simple and clean UI that makes it easy to understand the submission process and how things work there.
If you liked the idea and the article, an applaud would be… fabulous!
