A MINI PROJECT REPORT

ON

“MENTAL HEALTH ASSISTANT”

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE

MINI PROJECT 2B OF THIRD YEAR BACHELOR OF COMPUTER
ENGINEERING

BY

Hrishita Patil(05),
Pratiksha Phadtare(14),
Disha Sangade(22)

UNDER GUIDANCE OF

Dr. J. D. SAWARKAR

UNIVERSITY OF MUMBAI

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

DATTA MEGHE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING,

PLOT NO.98 SECTOR-3, AIROLI, NAVI MUMBAI

ACADEMIC YEAR 2021-22

 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the Mini project 2B entitled “Mental Health Assistant” is bona fide
work of Hrishita Patil, Pratiksha Phadtare, Disha Sangade submitted to the University of
Mumbai in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the Mini Project 2B of the Third Year of
“Undergraduate” in “Computer Engineering”.

Prof. A. P. Pande Dr.S.D.Sawarkar

Dr. J. D. Sawarkar
Supervisor
Head of the Department Principal

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 DATTA MEGHE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
AIROLI, NAVI MUMBAI

PROJECT APPROVAL

This project report entitled “Mental Health Assistant” of the students Hrishita Patil,

Pratiksha Phadtare, Disha Sangade approved for the third year of Computer Engineering.

Examiners

1………………………………………
(Internal Examiner Name & Sign)

2…………………………………………
(External Examiner name & Sign

Date :

Place :

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 DECLARATION

We declare that, this written submission represents our ideas in our own words and where
others' ideas or words have been included; we have adequately cited and referenced the
original sources. We also declare that, we have adhered to all principles of academic honesty
and integrity and have not misrepresented or fabricated or falsified any idea/data/fact/source
in our submission. We understand that any violation of the above will be cause for
disciplinary action by the Institute and can also evoke penal action from the sources which
have thus not been properly cited or from whom proper permission has not been taken when
needed.

Name of the Students Signature

Hrishita Patil

Pratiksha Phadtare

Disha Sangade

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Motivation and guidance are the keys towards success. I would like to extend my thanks to
all the sources of motivation.

We would like to grab this opportunity to thank Dr. S. D. Sawarkar, Principal for
encouragement and support he has given for our project.

We express our deep gratitude to Prof. A. P. Pande, Head of the Department who has been
the constant driving force behind the completion of this project.

We wish to express our heartfelt appreciation and deep sense of gratitude to my project guide
Prof. J. D. Sawarkar for his encouragement, invaluable support, timely help, lucid
suggestions and excellent guidance which helped us to understand and achieve the project
goal. His concrete directions and critical views have greatly helped us in successful
completion of this work.

We extend our sincere appreciation to all Professors for their valuable inside and tip during
the designing of the project. Their contributions have been valuable in so many ways that we
find it difficult to acknowledge of them individually.

We are also thankful to all those who helped us directly or indirectly in completion of this
work.

Place:

Date:

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 INDEX
1. INTRODUCTION

2. LITERATURE SURVEY

3. EXISTING SYSTEM

4. PROPOSED SYSTEM

4.1 Architecture/ Framework

4.2 Algorithm and Process Design

4.3 Technology used

4.4 Details Of Hardware and Software

5. ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHM

5.1 DFD /sequence diagram

6. OUTPUT

7. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

7.1 Sentence Case

8. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE SCOPE

8.1 Sentence Case

9. REFERENCES

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 LIST OF FIGURES

SR. NO. NAME OF THE FIGURE PAGE NO.

1 Architecture/framework 13

2 App version algorithm 15

3 Beta version algorithm 17

4 Sequence diagram/DFD 18

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 LIST OF CHARTS

SR. NO. NAME OF THE TABLE PAGE NO.

1 Pie charts for each survey questions 21

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ABSTRACT

In today's world, mental illness can hit anyone. Mental illnesses are an
extremely complex disease.The possible reasons could be endless like,
loneliness, relationships, deadlines, genetics, abuse, conflicts, medications,
major illnesses etc. Some people may experience depleted mental health and
feel overwhelmed with sadness and loneliness for no known reason. People
dealing with these may want to seek help by talking to somebody but they may
be afraid to speak to their close friends and relatives due to fear of being
misunderstood or judged. Mental Health Assistance is an attempt to give these
people a platform to talk without having any fears and helping them gradually
understand the root cause. It is developed from scratch with the intention of
helping people in regulating their moods and eliminating distorted and negative
thinking.

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1. INTRODUCTION

Mental disorders are widespread in countries all over the world. Nevertheless,
there is a global shortage in human resources delivering mental health services.
Leaving people with mental disorders untreated may increase suicide attempts
and mortality. To address this matter of limited resources, conversational agents
have gained momentum in the last few years. In this work, we introduce a
mobile application with an integrated chatbot that implements methods from
various platforms to support mentally ill people in regulating emotions and
dealing with thoughts and feelings. Our mental health assistant provides advice
based on their specific problems and it also automatically determines the basic
emotion of a user from the natural language input using natural language
processing approach.

This app is directed towards helping the audience who don't exactly know what
their emotions are, who want to figure out what illness they are suffering from.
Our intent is to make it easier for them to figure themselves out and get some
help for their betterment.

There is growing empirical support for use of digital technology in mental

health, where web platforms or smartphone applications are used to deliver
evidence-based interventions. These digital interventions are effective, feasible
and acceptable to users , although they are associated with low engagement and
poor adherence . The development of conversational agents, or chatbots could
offer an interesting solution .

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2. LITERATURE SURVEY

Initially chatbots, or conversational agents, were restricted, simulating very simple

conversation between a human and a computer in a scripted way. For example, the
very first chatbot created, Eliza, was given a script to be able to maintain a
conversation with its human counterpart. Presently, chatbots can complete
semantic analysis of the text that the user inputs, to provide a more tailored
response. Chatbots are now being used successfully as a means of providing useful
information. In one study, a chatbot enabled adolescents to ask questions about
sex, drugs and alcohol, and the information provided was found to be useful
compared to traditional information outlets or search engines. Educational
institutions utilise chatbots, as they provide a more interactive style of e-learning
for students. Chatbots can be used to help psychology students improve their skills
in diagnosing Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).

Our project is an humble attempt at achieving the same and more by creating a
safer environment for people to express their emotions. Mental health issues in
India are still a taboo which makes people suffering from them or on the verge of
having a mental illness more susceptible to going over the edge and taking
extreme steps. Lack of help and assistance or awareness of available help is the
current issue and with the help of this project we are trying to bring light to that.

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3. EXISTING SYSTEMS

Little research has been done on the impact of chatbots on mental health,
although there has been some discussion of their potential for overcoming
certain barriers in mental health, such as waiting lists and geographical
problems that hinder attendance at face-to-face counselling appointments.
SimCoach is an intelligent virtual human agent that aims to initiate user
engagement, increase awareness of symptoms and treatments for users who may
be reluctant to talk to a traditional counsellor. Another solution available utilises

a web camera and a set of questions to assess a user’s level of self-esteem and
anxiety. The overall aim is improving a user’s wellbeing, reducing anxiety and

anger by helping them to cope with stressful situations. Chatbots have been
used within the area of student counselling. Kavakli, Li and Rudra (2012)
explored the idea of using a chatbot to help students overcome exam stress, as
during exam time university counselling services can reach their peak capacity .
In their study on students, Bhakta, Savin-Baden, and Tombs (2014) found that
they perceived disclosing sensitive information to a chatbot as "safe".

Vitalk was installed voluntarily by members of the general population who had
found it on the hosting platform, through marketing campaigns, word of
mouth, or a personal search. Vitalk sought to offer conversations about mental
health and self help strategies to improve well-being. Users had installed Vitalk
between June and November 2019 and completed 1 month of a Vitalk program
(N = 3,629). All users were Portuguese speakers located in Brazil and over 18
years of age, with internet access.

Vitalk is an automated chatbot delivering mental health content in an innovative

conversational format. It is a free-to-use service, hosted within an instant
messenger platform, accessible from any internet-enabled device. The chatbot is
built on ruby and JavaScript and was created by the IT, product development
and UX team at TNH Health.

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PROPOSED SYSTEM

Architecture/ Framework

Our proposed architecture consists of 3 components, as illustrated in Fig: 1.

1. Application: User Interface- The UI of the application is where the user

interacts with the mental health assistant. We are proposing to create a web
application and if possible, an android application too. The requirements for the
UI are, it should be simple, organised with predefined modules for chatting with
the assistant, taking a psychological assessment test, a journaling feature for
recording their thoughts, a mood graph which keeps a track of their moods over

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extended periods of time and a recommendation feature to suggest them some
positive behavioural changes, exercises, relaxing music, good books etc [9].

2. Chatbot Architecture:
Text Analysis Using NLP - Text analysis focuses on making tools that aid
machines in understanding human conversations. The machine (chatbot) looks
at specific words, assigns them appropriate parts of speech, etc. Natural
Language Processing is normally performed as follows - the language is
detected, the text is then split in the pre-processing phase and then the meaning
is analysed using various means[10]. It is vastly difficult to train the machine on
hundreds of hours of specific call data to build a generative chatbot. It also
needs to be verified whether the receiver is giving correct answers to the caller
in the call logs used. Instead, a canned chatbot can be used which has a library
of possible questions from the user and standard replies to them. The chatbot
can be trained to recognise some sensitive triggers or key words in the text
entered by the user and ask them if they need to speak to a therapist or trained
professional, online. Other helpline numbers can be provided to the user. In our
proposed system, we will use the Naive Bayes classifier for sentiment analysis
of individual texts from the user.

Response to the User- The response to the user can be looked up in the library of
pre existing phrases and their replies. Generic sentence formation can adhere to
randomised variations of the reply. The response should be such that it keeps
the conversation going, encourages the user to share more of their thoughts and
identify any triggering events or emotions within them.

Psychological assessment- Psychological assessments help us make suppositions

about a person by using different techniques or combinations of them. An
informal but mainstream psych evaluation can help the recommendation model
determine the dominant problems or mood of the user based on training with
weighted replies.

3. A I Detection model: While the analysis of individual texts will be done

in the NLP module of the system, it should be noted that for better understanding
of the user’s sentiments, as well as to avoid inaccurate results, it is necessary to

take into account the context of the conversation[6] instead of making

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detections based on individual texts. To achieve this, the results from the text
analysis module will be fed to this model and the result will be calculated after
considering all the text classifications from the current context. This way,
relevant information from surrounding texts are given due importance while
detecting the mental state of the user.

Algorithm and Process Design

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1. Greetings: The bot will greet the users/clients.

2. User input: The user will greet back by mentioning their name.

3. Start of the questionnaire: The bot will start a conversation with a question
such as, “How may I help you?”

4. User’s answer: The user will express themselves to try to describe exactly
how they feel. Their can be two outcomes:

A. The both understands the given input by the recognised words from the
scraped data.

B. The bot fails to understand the given input/the words can’t be found by the
bot in the given data.

5. If the bot understands the given input, it will reply back with therapeutic
messages or some advices.

6. If the bot fails to recognise the keywords, a message will be displayed in the
chat “System failed to understand the phrase.”

7. If the user is satisfied with the advices given by the chatbot, they can continue
to chat and ask more questions till they want to.

8. In case, the user doesn’t want to continue, they can type in “stop” to terminate
the chat.

Beta version: In beta version chatbot, other processes with exactly the same as
the app version chatbot, the only difference it will have is, at the end of the chat,
a google form will be provided to the users wherein they can give their honest
feedbacks about the entire chatting with the bot experience and thus it will help
the creators for the betterment of the website/application.

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Beta version algorithm

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5. Analysis of Algorithm
5.1) Sequence Diagram/ DFD

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OUTPUT :
6. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

For our project we decided to do small-scale research using google forms.

Following were the questions asked and the received responses.

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22
Form this study we concluded that :

I. Even though most of our subjects are in the age 18 to 25, they have
experienced mental health problems.

II. Therapy is not as readily available to people as it should be.

III. Since therapy is not widely available, so testing for mental health
diseases is also not available to most.

IV. Maximum people are ready to/ willing to try a chat bot to help them
through a dark phase.

Our application is a attempt to bridge this gap and make therapy readily
available to people who want to talk and share their issues and this
small-scale research proved us that there is a requirement of such
application in the market.

We couldn’t find any similar applications which currently provide what

we are going to, hence we couldn’t do any research on them. But this just
shows use that we are here to bring something unique and much needed
to the people.

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7. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE

CONCLUSION:

To conclude we would like to say that Poor mental health is a common issue
today, and it's difficult for everyone suffering from mental illnesses to go for
therapy, since it might be too expensive for some people, while some might not
feel like discussing their problems with an actual person. Hence, virtual mental
health assistants will be preferred by many people. However, existing systems
have their limitations, and most of them are not free. In this paper, we have
proposed a system that will overcome some of the limitations of existing
systems. Our proposed system is an interactive chatbot which will try to
overcome the current issues to help the user by providing therapy at their
fingertips. We will even include helpline numbers for people to contact.

FUTURE SCOPE :

Our Recommendation system can be refined more by including an AI system

which will be added with the help of working professional therapists and
doctors to accurately identify mental illness of the user. This will not only help
the users but also the doctors job will become a lot easier as they can focus
more treating the illness.

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8. REFRENCES

[1] https://www.scienceopen.com/document?vid=a0f7da16-a051-4bfb-9d
c7-3baa875657c1

[2]https://scholar.google.co.in/scholar?q=github+mental+health+chatbot&
hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7695525/

[4] http s ://www. who. int/mental_health/en/

[5] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/mentalhealth
-in-india-7-5-of-country-affected-less-than-4000-expertsavailable/articleshow/
71500130.cms#:~:text=A%20report%20by%20
the%20World,and%20substance%20abuse%20disorder%20burden.

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSlTFsiK8Zg

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkTvw3usMw4

[8] https://chatbotslife.com/how-does-text-analysis-software-enhance-chatb
ots-758e61f96197

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