Inspiration

Both of us are passionate about technology for self-awareness and mental health. We believe that a deeper understanding of what exactly makes you happy or sad would lead to better choices and a more fulfilling day-to-day existence.

Here's the crux of the idea: if I was able to enter a small amount of information about my current situation and mood, I'd be able to derive actionable emotional insights that could lead me to be a happier person. These emotional plot points could then be displayed as a heat map, allowing said insights to be brought into stark contrast.

We think this holds tremendous value for the disciplined individual, the user who is committed to writing something about their psychology many times over the course of a day, but it also applies more broadly. If my university had (anonymized) access to my heatmap, especially if it had a temporal element, it would be able to more effectively organize breaks, assign coursework, host events, and use data to tend to student happiness when it previously would have had to guess.'

What it does

To do this, we wrote a small new tab page that shows the time and the current location of the user, and asks the user how they are doing and how they are feeling. The client then sends the server the user's location, coordinates, activity, and emotion.

When the server has entries, it runs semantic analysis to determine when and where the user is most stressed (although other metrics are surely possible), and generates a heatmap, showing the most stressful areas of campus and the most relaxing.

How I built it

We used Go for the backend, even though it was definitely not the best tool for the job.

We used Skeleton as the baseline CSS framewrok for the website, and the Google maps API to detect location and generate the heat map.

Challenges I ran into

Go, for all of being cool AND dope, was not the easiest tool to use for this backend project.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Getting Go to work with forms

Getting an entire Go backend serving files and taking queries up and running

Getting Google Maps to properly show the most prominent location in the vicinity

Reeeeeaaaalllly dope loading icon, quite proud of that

How simple and effective the user interface is

What I learned

Go server side programming/forms

Google Maps API

What's next for Cartographer

Transforming it into a more generalized life-logging application, usable for anyone who wants to keep track of, analyze, and improve upon any facet of their lives.

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