Don't Hate, Meditate!

Inspiration

We wanted to create a tool that could help the average person relieve stress. While certain tools like stress balls, outward venting, and coding can be great, we wanted to find a mobile solution.

What it does

"Don't Hate, Meditate!" is a website that lets you type in what is stressing you most and uses a speech parser to determine how severe your stress is. If it's determined that you are borderline suicidal, you are presented with the National Suicide Hotline. Otherwise, you can choose to alleviate your stress by watching your worry sink into nothing, or by flinging your trigger-word across the screen and letting gravity take over!

How we built it

The main website was developed on a simple HTML, CSS, and JS foundation. Natural language API was handled by indico, and the physics simulation was made possible by matter.js.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest downfall was the difficulty in setting the user's input text as a mask for the physics objects. Originally we wanted users to be able to fling their stresses around on their phones, but instead we had to compromise with just blank boxes. (still very amusing!) Natural language API's were also difficult to navigate. Google's Natural Speech API seemed like a very advanced option, and after trying it to no avail, we switched to a simpler API. If we continued this project, we would love to implement more accurate artificial intelligence for this aspect of speech parsing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the many obstacles we encountered while developing the website. From javascript canvas not being linked, to tricky animations and timings, all the way to giving the project a clean and polished look, we're proud of it all.

What we learned

All three team members learned about at least one new language or tool that can help in future projects. Each Engineer dabbled in JavaScript, efficient website design, and API usage. We all feel more experience leaving this project than we did when we started.

What's next for "Don't Hate, Meditate!"

We hope to impress at the DuckHacks presentations and we could easily see this project being picked up by a bigger team and developing it into a component on a larger website such as the American Mental Health Counselors Association website.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• matter.js