Dissociative Journal

Inspiration

We believe that an extraordinary challenge for a good programmer after acquiring strong debugging skills is to look for ways to apply them to the most complex system: the human mind. Looking for ideas from this perspective, it was easy for us to find an applicability of the typingdna solution. There are some dissociative identity disorder (DID) facts which suggest that about 7% of the general population may live with DID, but remain undiagnosed. We think that typingdna engine can be used as a tool to discover a person's multiple personalities.

What it does

The app (Dissociative Journal) allows the user to keep a journal in such a way that the messages of the different identities do not interfere. The core is based on the typingdna engine which distinguishes between the different ways of typing on the keyboard. By default, the journal entries of a certain identity can be read by user's other identities, but each identity can change this configuration. Any entry in the journal must contain at least 3 lines of text for it to be considered and addressed to a persona. If the application is used on iOS 13 or above, a sentiment analysis is applied to all the entries made. Thus, the user can identify an average state of mind specific to each of his/her identities. The app categorizes all the entries in 5 different emotions, each represented by a different color code.

How we built it

We started the development by creating a hybrid app, in React Native. It did not have enough accuracy, so we pivoted to an iPhone native app, in Swift. The Android/Kotlin option was in fact more convenient, but we chose Swift for the sake of technology variation. During the first phase we developed the user flow except the integration of typingdna library. This integration was a bit tricky, we had to extend the existing library and also to handle bugs. During the final phase of the development there were several rounds of tests and app improvements.

Challenges we ran into

Use of typingdna solution on iOS. The swift code was working only with UITextField components, so we had to extend it in order to work with UITextView as well.
Also, we fixed a bug in the swift code by comparing and debugging the swift, android and javascript implementations of the recording algorithm. In the same time we are grateful to the typingdna support and development teams who responded to our messages and fixed a bug on the server side.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a fully functional application
We innovated by using technology in a niche area of psychology
Having fun while learning about the human mind
Shooting and editing a video for the first time ever

What we learned

How to use typingdna solution
We read many scientific articles about the fascinating reality of those with DID
Operate with sentiment analysis

What's next for Dissociative Journal

Clinical tests in partnership with a hospital or university
Internal messaging functionality in order to allow the different identities to communicate each other