MiHNDbot
An early conversational agent for exploring mental health and neurodiversity information, built around publicly available NHS content and other online sources.
2019
What it does
- Ask questions about mental health and neurodiversity using a collection of NHS content and other public information.
- Reflect on mood, sleep, exercise and everyday sources of stress through a guided check-in.
- Answer follow-up questions that adapt to what you have already shared.
- Explore conversation activity, common questions and themes through a companion analytics dashboard.
The challenge
I wanted to make a body of knowledge about mental health and neurodiversity accessible through conversation. I was an early adopter of Microsoft's frameworks for rules-based chat, using publicly available NHS content and other online sources as the foundation. The challenge was turning that material into useful interactions with technology that depended heavily on predefined questions and dialogue paths.
What I learned
The technology was not quite there yet. The interactions were too brittle, and it was difficult to make the agent useful beyond the paths I had anticipated. Looking back, I think the same idea would be much simpler to prototype with today's tools. It was an early encounter with the gap between an appealing conversational experience and what the technology could reliably support.
Built with
- JavaScript
- Node.js
- Microsoft Bot Framework
- QnA Maker
- Chart.js