Feeling Well

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Feeling Well Architecture Diagram

Inspiration

When brainstorming ideas for approaching wellness, we asked ourselves the question, “What if all the resources you needed to promote wellness could be found in a single bot?”. While we knew that there were in-person solutions for promoting wellness in the workplace, there were few resources on how to tackle this issue online. In such, we needed a solution that would, not only provide resources for all forms of wellness, but also be usable by employees in the workplace and employees working from home. Therefore, for user friendly capabilities and also accessibility, we determined that a bot with automated scheduling and assistance would be a viable solution.

What it does

Feeling Well incentivizes employees to take breaks for developing wellness by offering monthly rewards based on the amount of breaks they take. In these break sessions, we offer the employees activities that they can take to help develop their emotional, environmental, mental, physical, social, spiritual, and financial well being. The breaks can be taken with other people or individually, with breaks being conducted with other people giving more points for monthly rewards to encourage employees to work together. Additionally, for the sake of employees feeling comfortable to take the breaks, we will give them the option to take breaks and activities anonymously, and self-log when they have taken a break for the monthly rewards. We also have servers that host activities non-anonymously in case companies want to offer rewards to employees to take breaks non-anonymously and receive data to help develop the company’s wellness program.

In addition to establishing reminders to take breaks and incentivizing breaks, Feeling Well also allows users to receive specialized reminders dependent on the type of wellness they would like to develop. Ranging from break games like Minesweeper and Connect 4 for mental wellness to suggesting walks at nearby parks for environmental wellness, Feeling Well can automate a variety of solutions depending on the type of wellness a user would like to work on.

Wellness is not simply practiced by individuals, but also by groups, and in such Feeling Well is prepared to automate group meeting invites. For instance, in the case that a user would like to work on spiritual wellness, Feeling Well can, not only send a meditation video for employees to follow, but also send a link to a Microsoft Teams meeting should the user choose to practice this in a group setting.

Finally, Feeling Well can also provide answers for frequently asked questions. As users may have questions in their time developing wellness, the bot will be prepared to answer questions both related to wellness as well as resources pertaining to wellness. This includes questions such as “Where can I find therapy?” and “What are some company resources for burnout?”. By preparing Feeling Bot to answer these questions, it allows users to find immediate answers and also understand how their organization can help in developing wellness.

How we built it

Feeling Well was built using Microsoft Teams as an interface and two separate bots for the employee interactions. One bot, built on Bot Composer and deployed to Azure Bot Services, is used to give the activities for the breaks to the user as well as hold general questions that the user may have regarding wellness. The automated logging of information for activities was done using application insights to get information on the websites and Azure Functions to transfer that logged info into a more accessible place, in this case Azure Tables. Our other bot, built using Microsoft Power Automate, is used to help the employee schedule and log their breaks for the monthly rewards. We are also using Microsoft Sharepoint Excel to keep track of the logged points and the rewards the employee has won.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge that we ran into when building Feeling Well was interfacing with Microsoft Teams through outside resources like azure functions. For good reason, all Microsoft Graph API involving teams are protected, but this protection heavily restricted the resources that we could use to connect to Microsoft Teams. This restriction made it so that we could only use Microsoft Power Automate to interact with Microsoft Teams which limited the scope of what we could accomplish for Feeling Well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the fact that we have made a fully functioning application that we believe can encourage employees to take breaks and focus on developing their wellness.

What we learned

From this project, we learned a lot about how to connect azure resources to Microsoft Teams and the protection around Microsoft Teams access. We also learned about Power Automate and the ability it has to be a gateway for connecting Azure resources, SharePoint files, and MIcrosoft Teams. Finally, because we were looking up activities for our bot to suggest, we found a lot of activities that we plan to use to develop our own mental health.

What's next for Feeling Well

Feeling Well is rather new and in the future, we hope to work on several other capabilities. For instance, we would like to introduce a meeting invite creation capability through the bot, allowing for Feeling Well to establish meetings between employees to practice social wellness. Additionally, we would like to develop a functionality to create a Microsoft Teams with Feeling Well specifically for each team. This way, Feeling Well may deliver wellness tips and messaging to entire teams and departments. Finally, we would like to see Feeling Well create leaderboards for certain activities to showcase a department’s collective pursuit for wellness.