Dear Diary

Inspiration

Keeping a diary offers the chance to improve self-awareness. Getting to know yourself in this way provides an opportunity to communicate your feelings in a tangible way. Current research looking into diary keeping has shown that the act of writing provides a tool that can unlock the thoughts and feelings you might be disregarding.
We think of mental health as an issue that is at a very high risk of going unnoticed. People are more likely to ignore certain behavioural changes that a poor mental health can stimulate, impacting their daily lives. Therefore we decided to create a virtual diary which equips us to analyse user's mental state.

What it does

Evidence has indicated that keeping a diary can make you happier. Whilst it seems like a trivial task, diary keeping has shown to reduce depressive thoughts and behaviours by providing the writer with increased control. This useful intervention has also been seen to have long-lasting effects on mental health. It’s not just a quick fix. Using Dear Diary, user sentiments and moods will be analysed on the basis of the kind of entries they write. Be it be maintaining a journal or writing a fiction- your mental health dictates the extent of impactful words you use. Dear Diary tackles this ignorance of subtle signs by showing the user the trend in their thinking pattern which would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

How we built it

Implementation of a sentiment analyserAPI coupled with the use of a natural language processing machine learning model by Google Cloud. Technologies used:

Node.js
MongoDB (as database)
Express.js
Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Natural Language for sentiment analysis)

Challenges we ran into

Initially, there were some problems while connecting our project to MongoDB Atlas.
Integrating third party APIs due to lack of previous experience.
Setting roles and following a schedule due to the remote setting.
Developing a Progressive Web Application

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Developed a fully functional version of the project under the given time constraints
Aesthetics of the application
Learned to combine all of our expertise to create a platform which solves a real world problem
Sentiment Analysis to display custom message to enhance user experience
Created a full responsive web application
Offered a light/ dark mode toggle for enhanced user experience

What we learned

Idea brainstorming
Sentiment detection from text
Implementing light/dark mode
Integrating Google Cloud Provider Services to our application

What's next for Dear Diary

This is just the start for ‘Dear Diary’. We plan to send alerts to the user and one of the user's emergency contact if the. user has been in a sad mood constantly for a few days. Our stretch goal is to create a native mobile application for the web-app for better user experience.