Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

Caolán O’Hagan 

BSc [Hons] Creative Computing

I am a graduate of Creative Computing in IADT. I am a problem solving developer from County Wicklow. Over the course of my four years at IADT I have developed my Object Orientated Programming skills in a variety of different languages. I have an interest in all aspects of development but in my last two years I focused on web-development and mobile app development through React Native. I have excellent communication skills and enjoy working as part of a team. I am passionate about interesting innovative projects and drive change. For my final year project I designed and developed a mental health chatbot called Amica.

Project Description

Amica comes from the latin word for friend. Amica is a chatbot designed to help combat the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Amica was built using JavaScript and Python. The back-end of this application consists of a Python Flask API that holds all the natural language processing and machine learning functionality. The front-end of this application is a React Native mobile application. A neural network performs text classification on user's messages and generates a reply using its knowledge base. Depending on the user's conversational flow, Amica can offer additional functionality in the front end based on what the user says. This additional functionality includes, adding notes to the user's journal, logging their current mood, or replying with a scripted conversation. Amica will trigger an event on the front-end asking the user to enter a journal entry or log their mood when it infers that the user's message has characteristics of a journal entry or a mood log.