Core

Helping individuals as they overcome opioid dependency by providing them with volunteer mentors

Comment 2

Inspiration

The US and the broader continent is in the midst of a drug crisis affecting a large fraction of the population: the opioid crisis. The direct spark that led us to develop Core was the recent publication of a study that used a model to predict the effects of different intervention methods on reducing overdose deaths and frequency of individuals developing dependencies on opiates. The model's predictions were pretty bleak in the short term.

What it does

Core seeks to provide individuals looking to overcome opiate and other drug addictions with strong and supportive connections with volunteer mentors. At the same time, it fills another need -- many college students, retirees, and moderately unfulfilled professionals are looking for a way to help bring about positive change without wasting time on transportation or prep. Core brings a human-centered, meaningful volunteer experience opportunity directly to people in the form of an app.

How we built it

We used Flask for the backend and jQuery for the frontend. We incorporated various APIs, such as the IBM Watson Personality Insights API, the Facebook API, and the GIPHY API.

Challenges we ran into

It took us a while to get the Facebook OAuth API working correctly. We initially worked separately on different parts of the app. It was an interesting experience to stitch together all of our individual components into a streamlined and cohesive app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of Core!

What we learned

We learned a lot about all the natural language processing APIs that IBM Watson has to offer and the workings of the Facebook OAuth API.

What's next for Core

Lots of features are in the works including a rating system to enable mentees to rate mentors to ensure productive relationships and more detailed chat pairing based on location information and desired level of user engagement.

Share this project:

Updates