BiPolar Express

A mood tracker specifically designed to help people suffering from bipolar disorder understand more about their episodes including patterns and triggers as part of cognitive behavior therapy.

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Inspiration

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder during the end of my senior year, at a point where my instability led to my rock bottom. When I saw the prompt of helping a minority, I knew instantly that I wanted to make an application that caters to me and, hopefully, people like me.

What it does

The mood tracker is based on the leading form one of the leading forms of treatment for people with bipolar disorder, cognitive behavior therapy, which places its focus on helping diagnosees understand (cognitively) their behaviors- triggers and other patterns. This can aid them in controlling their disorder.

How we built it

I built it in Java using a GUI I wrote with doodlepad.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge I ran into was finding a way to track patterns in the mood documented. I knew that my AI skills were lacking, and I couldn't see myself finding the time to teach myself how to make a program that would find trends in excerpts describing episodes, so I thought of a way to break down the problem into smaller pieces in a very literal sense. Rather than excerpts, the user would type keywords and phrases, and repeating words and phrases with a type of episode would be seen as a trend. This helped me simplify the problem to something I knew I could teach myself in time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm incredibly proud of how hard I was able to work and the healthy habits I was able to maintain. This program took me a lot of time to complete and I wanted to create something smart, professional, and aesthetically pleasing, as it's about an issue that is highly important to me- which meant that I worked very hard to meet that standard, summing up around 25-30 hours typing during the hackathon. Despite this, I still also managed to keep healthy habits, keeping in mind my hygiene, eating, and making sure I'm taking breaks.

What we learned

I learned a simple way of recognizing trends in complex situations and implementing them in code in a way that I understand well enough to break it down simply to someone who knows nothing about code.

What's next for BiPolar Express

Next, I want to use android studio to share my app on the play store so that it would be accessible to other people like me all over the world. I truly hope my project makes a difference for them.

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