Studies available on NASA’s Open Data Portal indicate that sensory monotony and social isolation are major threats to psychological well-being. Also, according to data visualization available on Public Tableau website shows that people in isolation scenario invest their time most in cooking, consuming online video stream and eating than interacting through any social media. The lack of human interaction can increase the sense of loneliness and compromise people’s interpersonal skills. The core of our solution is to increase human interactivity through gamification concepts, calling users to interact to each others by performing ludic activities in a simple way.
The humanity is facing a great challenge due the new corona virus. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 affected not just people’s life but also the global economy. Our best defense on this battle is being isolated, far away from people that we love and, in many cases, unable to perform our job duties. This sense of weakness in face of the invisible enemy and the difficulties to adapt a new routine can contribute to the emergency of serious threats to the psychological well-being.
NASA has a program called ANSIBLE (A Network of Social Interactions for Bilateral Life Enhancement) which is toolset that helps their flight crew to minimize the latency of communication when they are isolated on missions. There are also digital agents to provide them companion and tools to assist them to maintain their interpersonal skills. This program was an inspiration for our idea that is to provide humanity a feature with similar characteristics to assist people to adapt better during social isolation.
We do not want to reinvent the wheel, but adapt existing technologies integrating a new feature to instant message apps which is part of people’s daily routine. The solution was the creation of a chatbot agent that when called by users allows them to play a game and interact on a ludic way.
We use Android Studio to develop a Flutter application using Dart language. Database used was Firebase and the chatbot was built using Dialogflow. Our biggest challenge was to integrate services in our application.
https://youtu.be/ptchkf5zhtU