Anchor: Grounded in Nature

Inspiration

Our inspiration for Anchor came from a shared desire to support those navigating delusions, paranoia, and other serious mental health challenges—communities that are often underserved by traditional wellness apps. We were inspired by the story of a schizophrenic man and his service dog who was trained to alert and greet people and helped the man differentiate between his delusions and reality. Recognizing the calming and restorative power of nature, and the potential of AI-driven support, we envisioned Anchor as a gentle, nature-themed companion to help users feel safe, grounded, and seen.

What it does

Anchor is a mental wellness assistant designed to help users feel more connected and stable in their daily lives. It offers:

📝 Journal Diary with AI Chat: Users can write journal entries and receive supportive, therapist-style responses from a Google Gemini-powered chatbot. The AI offers empathy, perspective, and helpful mental health recommendations. 🌙 Sleep Tracker: A simple interface where users log the length and quality of their sleep, helping them track and improve sleep habits over time. 🍃 Grounding Exercises: Scientifically-backed activities that prompt users to focus on their surroundings by finding and observing objects with specific characteristics (like color, texture, or shape)—a powerful way to ease anxiety or delusional thoughts. 🌸 Flower Garden Rewards: A gentle gamification element that rewards healthy habits. Completing tasks like writing journal entries unlocks new flowers, visually representing progress and care.

How we built it

Our app was built using JavaScript in the React Native framework, using CloudFlare on the back-end. We leveraged the Gemini API to respond to the user's journal entries and assist them with grounding.

Challenges we ran into

We were faced with tackling a brand new framework and testing with Expo Go. We were ambitious with our goals, and constantly widened our scope, resulting in a race against time. This was our first time using CloudFlare, React Native, and Gemini API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of all of the features we were able to implement into our app, such as AI powered responses to journal entries, a weekly report of these journal entries along with the user's sleep schedule, and a grounding exercise that prompted the user to find objects that meet specific visual characteristics.

What we learned

We became more familiar with using services such as using Wrangler to deploy Cloudflare workers, React Native, and Gemini API. We also learned that we are capable of making a tangible impact on marginalized communities.

What's next for Anchor: Grounded in Nature

We want to add more grounding features and scale our solution connecting health care professionals to our users and other users of our app to foster a community under our service.