Inspiration
Our journey began with a realization about the struggles many women face, particularly new mothers dealing with postpartum depression. This condition, though common, often goes undiscussed and untreated. Inspired by strong women in our lives, we wanted to create a project that can make any mothers day a bit brighter. Baby Blues embodies our commitment to female empowerment, using the emotions from music as a way to offer comfort and connection to mothers going through postpartum emotions.
What it does
Baby Blues uses Hume's API to determine the emotional state of a mother based on audio cues. Each emotion is ranked using their sentiment values from both text and tone of speech. Using the mood of a mother, Baby Blues create a suitable playlist from the songs on Spotify. For example, if the mother is feeling sad, we recommend both a relaxed/calming playlist, and one that matches their mood. Beyond this, the app keeps track of emotional trends over time providing valuable insight of a mother's mental health. After creating the playlist, the playlist is the pushed onto our front-end which is done using react native. Based on the emotion of the user, the color of the app background will change to reflect their mood.
How we built it
Front-End: For our front-end, we used React Native and Expo to create a mobile application. After embedding the playlist and graph onto the screen, we used React Native and CSS styling to ensure that app functions intuitively and is polished.
Back-End: Our back-end consists of Spotify's API and Hume's API. Spotify's API is used to generate playlists based on certain keywords. These keywords are the emotions that come from Hume AI's voice sentiment analysis. The highest value is chosen which represents the emotion that the mother is most feeling.
Challenges we ran into
A major challenge we ran into was connecting the back-end with our front-end. This was the first time using React Native and Expo so it was very confusing trying to get the app up and running. Another issue we came upon was trying to distinguish the most important emotions that a mother may feel during postpartum. Hume's API, had much more detectable emotions then the ones we needed. Because of this, it took trial and error trying to identify the emotions to use in Baby Blues.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of completing the project and having a functional application. More specifically, this was the first time we ever worked on a mobile application so we are very glad that we managed to overcome our hurdles. In addition, we are proud of the fact we created a project that could potentially help others.
What we learned
This Hackathon gave us the opportunity to learn how new mothers feel and how music could help them with their emotional wellbeing. By creating the project, we researched topics such as postpartum depression and music therapy to gain as much insight as possible.
What's next for Baby Blues
We were thinking about improving some features and adding some features such as allowing mothers to get advice from experts. We also wish to expand Baby Blues onto a webpage so it would function beyond mobile applications. We can also use other music platforms such as Apple Music and Pandora in case users do not have Spotify.
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