Mental Health SMS Check-Ins with Twilio + Airtable

It’s important to check in on your mental health, especially in times like these. The problem is it’s hard to remember to do this yourself. We get caught up in everything that is going on and forget all about taking care of ourselves.

This SMS bot solves that problem by checking in with you everyday via SMS and saving your responses in Airtable. It's a mindfulness journal that you won't forget to write in. If you want to take a break, your bot even supports pause and resume keywords.

After copying and deploying your own version of it, you can create your own questions and have friends sign up to join you in answering them everyday.

I created my own mindfulness bot called Harold a few months ago and it has helped me make more progress on my daily habits than I have in years. There are so many useful applications of this stack and I'm excited to see what bots the Autocode community builds with it!

Setting up your own version is easy! The only things you'll need beforehand are a Twilio account (don't buy a number yet) and a copy of this Airtable base:

You can clone this base by clicking here.

Once you've cloned the Airtable base, click and install the app. You'll be prompted to choose a name for your bot as an environment variable and to link the base you just cloned and your Twilio phone number. Follow the instructions, then after you've deployed, text register to your Twilio number to start receiving check-ins!

What Your Bot Can Do

Your bot can respond to a few user commands, all routed within the functions/events/twilio/sms/received.js endpoint. This runs whenever someone messages the phone number for the bot.

The first thing this handler does is check to see whether the incoming phone number has registered already like this:

let phoneNumberQuery = await lib.airtable.query['@0.5.3'].select({
  table: 'Phone Numbers',
  where: [{
    'Phone Number__is': `${event.From}`
  }]
});

From there, depending on what the contents of the incoming text, a few things can happen:

Texting register if the incoming number has not registered will call the insert method of the airtable.query API and register the incoming phone number for daily check-ins.
Texting pause will pause daily check-ins for the incoming number by setting a field called Paused on the appropriate record in the Phone Numbers Airtable table.
Texting resume will resume daily check-ins for the incoming number by unsetting the above field.
Texting anything else will be interpreted as a response to the daily check-in. If the user has not registered, they will be prompted to do so first. Otherwise, the bot checks to see whether the user has responded to the question within the last day:

let recentAnswerQuery = await lib.airtable.query['@0.5.3'].select({
  table: `Answers`,
  where: [{
    'Question__contains': mostRecentlyAskedQuestion.id,
    'Phone Number__contains': phoneNumberQuery.rows[0].id
  }]
});
let recentAnswer = recentAnswerQuery.rows.find((answer) => {
  return new Date(answer.createdTime) > new Date(new Date().getTime() - 86400000);
});

If they have, the bot updates their existing response. Otherwise, the bot creates a new record of the response in Airtable with linked records matching the day's question and the phone number.

Note: All Airtable linked records are many-to-many joins behind the scenes, hence the need for __contains. If you want to learn more about querying Airtable through Autocode, you can check out the spec they use, KeyQL.

The other part of the bot is a scheduler that runs every day at 830am PST (you can change this to whatever time/timezone combination you want in your own version). This bot selects either an unsent or the least recently sent question and does a for loop over all the registered phone numbers:

await lib.airtable.query['@0.5.3'].records.update({
  table: `Questions`,
  id: leastRecentQuestion.id,
  fields: {
    'Last Sent At': new Date().toISOString()
  }
});
let phoneNumberQuery = await lib.airtable.query['@0.5.3'].select({
  table: 'Phone Numbers',
  where: [{
    'Paused__not': true
  }]
});
for (let i = 0; i < phoneNumberQuery.rows.length; i++) {
  await lib.twilio.messages['@0.1.1'].create({
    to: phoneNumberQuery.rows[i].fields['Phone Number'],
    body: `Hey there! It's your robot friend ${process.env.BOT_NAME} with today's question:\n\n${leastRecentQuestion.fields['Question']}`
  });
}

That's just a high level summary. Feel free to dive into the code and make modifications of your own!

Follow me on Twitter @bagelsangranola if you want to say hi or have any questions.

And if you want to track your daily habits, sign up here for early access to my bot, Harold. He's a great support system for making progress on side projects. Without him I don't think I would be writing this!

Shout out to Jacob Lee @ Autocode for the help and support on this project!