BeWell

The Social Page allows you to see your friends and others' responses to Today's question
The Daily checkin allows you to be able to reflect on your day and see how you felt today along with how your friends are feeling
Leaderboard adds a sort of competition as an incentive to stay on top of focusing on yourself and checking the app constantly
Notifications allows you to be able to reach out to your friends within the app in case you wanna do a quick check in on them
Profile allows you to be able to see a quote of the day but also be able to see the posts that you have created

Inspiration

In the psychology classes we have taken, we have learned about how important it is to practice gratitude and have a positive mindset, along with the many health benefits that may come from these practices. As college students, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the many responsibilities that we have to manage. We wanted to create an app which encourages students to take a break from the stress and reflect on the positive things in their lives. We also wanted to implement a social feature so that we can help spread positivity and gratitude as much as we can to our friends and social circles!

What it does

Our app, BeWell sends a notification at a random time during the day with a prompt that encourages users to reflect on positive aspects of their life. Prompt examples include: something that you’re grateful for that day, something that you’re looking forward to, someone that’s important to you, etc. After others have responded to the prompt, you are able to see their answers. Users also receive a point for every prompt answered! There is also a feature on our app with which users can “check in '' and report how they are feeling that day on a scale of 1 to 5, as well as see how friends are doing. You are also able to get points by commenting something nice under your friend’s check-ins to cheer them up if they’re having a rough day. Lastly, you can see how many positivity points you and your friends have earned by checking the leaderboard!

How we built it

We basically created the frontend using React. This was because we know that React makes things very easy to show how a website should look on the front-end while still having a lot of libraries/packages for working with other components such as mui. For our backend, we used Cockroach DB to be able to store each member’s answer to the question of the day along with other information that we felt users would want to see as they interacted with the app. Summary: react native, javascript, node.js, cockroachdb

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we faced along the way include automatically sending out scheduled text messages at random times on a daily basis using Twilio’s API and making our pages full-stack since we struggled connecting our database to our front-end. Furthermore, we had to re-familiarize ourselves with certain frameworks and languages since it has been a while since we have used them. However, the biggest challenge we faced was racing against the clock; we had several ideas we hoped to incorporate into BeWell, but we did not have enough time to code them all into fruition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We isolated a need within our community for mental health and wellness support and identified a solution through allowing your network to support you through the tough times. Our design and implementation for BeWell is user-friendly and simple allowing for a larger emphasis on the well-being and the support system of our users.

What we learned

We learned many technical and group work skills. Using ReactJS made it efficient for us to make our website, but some of us were new to the language or trying to relearn some of the forgotten skills, so it was a good refresher/lesson. We were able to gain a deeper understanding of web development overall throughout this project. Additionally, we learned how to resolve several merge conflicts, connect a backend to a frontend, import libraries properly, etc. However, the most important thing we learned was how to identify an issue, devise a solution, and work on it together as a team. This is a crucial skill to have for any team to succeed and through this hackathon we will be more prepared to pursue our endeavors as developers.

What's next for BeWell

To take BeWell to the next step, we would like to fully have all the data be implemented to Cockroach Db to ensure that people would be able to access their data from any device that they are on. This is because it would be an API call to the database instead of needing any of the data to be loaded on their site themselves. On top of that, we would like to have it registered to our domain name dukebewell.tech so that students would be able to access it. Lastly, another implementation that would be great to have implemented is an automatic text using twilio to be able to reach out to your friends and tell them you care about them. We want this to be a support system for groups so making something where you are able to reach out to your friends if you feel they aren’t doing great would help in the support a lot of students and people in general need.