Eunoia Project - Space Apps Challenge

Eunoia Project| The Isolation Solution

The Isolation Solution

Social distancing policies enacted the world over during the COVID-19 pandemic have left many people socially isolated. Your challenge is to develop innovative solutions to combat social isolation.

Eunoia Chat

Summary

Eunoia Chat is a chatbot trained by NASA psychologists. It provides solutions for situations that people suffer during confinement, applying the knowledge that NASA has on this subject for space. Eunoia will continue to learn and improve the answers.This means huge benefits for both sides. NASA will be able to learn about behavior patterns based on different profiles of various ages and cultures, which will allow better solutions to be applied to space projects.

How We Addressed This Challenge

The challenge was to develop innovative solutions to combat social isolation. We believe that NASA's knowledge of social isolation and confinement situations that an astronaut suffers can be key to dealing with a pandemic.

When people are isolated, it is normal for the body to be in a more stressful situation. Some of the most common problems that may occur are:

Decreased mood, cognition, morale, or interpersonal interaction
Development of sleep disorder

NASA has already been studying people in isolated and confined spaces for years and has developed methods and technologies to counteract the problems that can result from that situation.

The chatbot benefits confined people by creating a conversational model, which aims to provide the chatbot with answers to typical questions users can have in the most humane way possible and, above all, to answer queries. Users will be able to ask any question and receive information that applies to space missions. We aim to reduce the mental and psychological risks that this situation of isolation can produce.

For this reason Eunoia Chat was born, a chatbot trained by NASA psychologists that aims to help people who find themselves in a situation of isolation with methods that have been developed by NASA for this purpose in space.

How We Developed This Project

We tried to be as efficient as possible, to meet the challenge within the time and resources we had.

Research:

First, we did some research on the different challenges and what ideas could come out of each one. We decided that the challenge that best suits us was the one of Isolations Solutions because of the situation we had just experienced. We found interesting being able to think of a solution that would positively improve the experience of confinement. Indeed we were already very aware of each of the problems as we had detected them during these last 2 months.

Brainstorming:

Between us, we worked on Saturday morning to brainstorm. We validated with friends and family which ones they thought could be more interesting, until we came up with the idea of creating a chatbot.

We researched the chatbot and, as a summary, drew some conclusions:

What's a chatbot?

A chatbot is an artificial intelligence program designed to interact with the user and answer predetermined questions automatically.

Analysis and examples of how a chatbot is integrated

Chatbot queries: a chatbot can serve as a way to consult information quickly and personally.
Conversational chatbot: a chatbot can be programmed to interact and respond in the most humane way possible to any question. A chatbot helps you learn a language by talking to it.
Service improvement: It can help improve certain processes, such as hospital consultations. A chatbot performs a pre-diagnosis on the patient to speed up the healthcare
Chatbot assistant: tools that allow you to speed up your processes with natural language. A virtual assistant that helps you organize your schedule. It recommends times for meetings according to your calendar, organizes it and everything as if it were a real secretary.
Analytics on a chatbot: analyzing the use of your chatbot can help you correct mistakes (for example, see where people get lost in the process)

Functions and uses of chatbots

Across-device

The use of a chatbot can be through devices such as a car, a voice assistant, etc. (voice control). Or a mobile phone, a computer, etc. (keyboard control)

Machine Learning

A chatbot is able to understand communication by detecting patterns, keywords and learning

Integration

By creating a chatbot, you can be able to integrate it on different platforms, increasing its presence.

Definition

We liked the idea of creating a chatbot. We saw that it could be very beneficial for society and NASA, so we decided to spend more time on conceptualising the design.

We are designers, so we wanted our proposal to be an app with a careful and user-friendly interface.

On Saturday afternoon, we worked collaboratively on the Figma program. A program that allows us to design in a collaborative way, besides creating a repository in Notion where we were archiving the resources we found, information or texts.

We found the design on Saturday, but we did not want to stay in just a nice design.

We researched articles about the astronauts' experiences, about the impact of confinement on the mind, about NASA research, about chatbots, etc.

Based on videos and articles, we created the conversation, which could be a common case

We saw that the chatbot system we proposed (question and answer) could evolve and add more features. We decided to make a questionnaire to know better the state of the user, to understand better his profile and to be able to give more similar answers. In addition, we thought of adding objectives, so that we would not be left with just one answer.

We created the prototype of how it would be, all from the Figma tool, which also allows us to create prototypes with interactions.

We had it ready!

We tested it with our relatives and the result was very positive.

They added ideas, such as taking this chatbot to smart speakers, being able to see other users' problems, or even giving Eunoia a personality and having it be a robot that talks to us. We think it's very interesting how such a project could evolve, although for now for the Challenge, it's a minimal product.