HackLife<3

At HackLife <3 2024, held at the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, we tackled a real-world challenge in the field of neurodivergence: we developed a prototype of an AI-powered support chatbot designed for parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The goal was to offer immediate, personalized guidance based on both general autism knowledge and child-specific therapeutic information.

The system combined a ChromaDB-based knowledge store—containing curated resources such as books, clinical guidelines, and research papers—with individual therapist notes for each child. Using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, the chatbot delivered context-aware responses through an LLM, helping parents better understand situations, manage daily challenges, and access relevant strategies in real time.

The prototype demonstrated how tailored AI assistance can support families while preserving the nuance and variability inherent in autism care based on a fictional sample patient called Johnny.

The prototype that was deployed using streamlit is available here.