Baad Day

Inspiration

An estimated 1.2 million children and youth in Canada are affected by mental illness—yet, less than 20 per cent will receive appropriate treatment. Rising since the pandemic, the Canadian health system continues to experience a backlog in hospital capacities for children in need of mental health services. This leads to worsening issues, prolonged recovery, and delayed medical screenings. To tackle this problem amongst the youth, Baad Day provides an interactive interface for children to learn more about mental health— and specifically, how to navigate a Baad day. This helps the youth recognize mental health issues in their daily habits and learn how to combat them.

What it does

Baad Day brings awareness to the struggles one faces throughout the day and how to handle them. Children often experience stressors at school or home including new feelings they have never experienced before. Baad Day presents the user with situations that can deteriorate one's mental health, such as staying in bed too often, eating unhealthy foods, demotivating affirmations, and substance abuse. Our web app provides them with choices to make in each situation that will either improve or worsen their states. Mental health issues require timely and effective care, and educating the youth early on how to recognize them can greatly prevent hospital backlogs in mental health care.

How we built it

We built our web app using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS on VSCode.

Challenges we ran into

We attempted to implement Cohere Classification API, which takes multiple test cases and classifies them into categories for positive, negative, and neutral affirmations in scenario 3. Our web app could then classify the user input into the categories, and using the second Cohere Generate API, it would produce a more motivating affirmation as a suggestion based on the user input. Due to time constraints, we couldn’t fully implement the API to produce our desired return. We hope to practice using this API for more efficient purposes in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have produced an interactive and educational web app using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, by applying the skills we learned in our school.

What we learned

We learned that it is imperative to maintain consistent and effective communication when collaborating on code, and how many difficulties arise when there is miscommunication.

What's next for Baad Day

Moving forward, Baad Day wants to implement the Co:here and FoodData Central API to create more impactful systems within our web app. As well, we hope to implement a diverse range of scenarios that one encounters, from frequent ones to obscure situations. This helps to build awareness and allows the youth to recognize these moments and learn how to approach them for the future.