EM:) | Devpost

Logo & cover photo

Inspiration

In the United States, about 6.8 percent of the population, 15 million adults, have suffered from social phobia.

Globally, the estimated one-year prevalence of social phobia from all sources is 4.5%, while the lifetime prevalence is about 3.6%. However, only 0.53% of South Koreans suffer from social phobia, while the number of People in Udmurtia, a sovereign republic within the Russian Federation, jumps to 45.6%.

Inspired by personal experience, when we feel lonely and we don't have the energy or pressure to chat with others, we can comfort ourselves by knowing others' status and sharing our feelings anonymously. By this crowdsensing, we feel more engage with our social life.

What it does

“Em:)” helps you know the emotion of the world. The user-friendly and straightforward platform provides two emotion buttons— “Wonderful” and “Not so good”. By pressing the buttons, you can show and record your feelings at any time, and you will immediately know how many people share the same feeling with you. This kind of crowdsensing will give you comfort which help you out from loneliness. You have the world’s resonance.

How we built it

We use React and JavaScript for the front-end and Flask for the back-end. Flask for building APIs that relates to calculating amount of user currently clicking either of the options, and delete deprecated choices.

Challenges we ran into

There is a technical problem that prevents our group from deploying the working webapp to a server, which cost us plenty of time and we were finally still not able to deal with it. We had to just run the demo in development environment. We were also in a shortage of time, since all four members are busy with classes this weekend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It is the first hackathon for our team, and we are just proud that we finished in time to submit something. We don't really expect prizes. We built a better team, achieved better teamwork, and made our hackathon debut. These are the accomplishments that we are truly proud of.

What we learned

Nowadays, the highly developed urbanization and information technology push the distance between people farther and farther. People are fragile that sometimes their personal psychological problems and desires will not only affect themselves, but also affect the society. Technology is often used to solve engineering and practical problems. But very little real attention has been paid to the inner feelings of human beings. Through this project, we learned that science and technology should also have humanistic care. Through humanistic care, technology changes not only the convenience of our way of life, but also our emotions. Technology empowers people, makes them stronger, happier and freer.

What's next for EM:)

Currently, EM:) can only randomly manage messages that happy people send to sad people, meaning they can't chat directly. We hope to develop it into a service where users can optionally chat freely and anonymously. This will provide many opportunities for people with social phobia to touch and connect with real people and comfort their loneliness and help them practice chatting. Also, EM:) is waiting to be deployed to a server, which is the nearest step from us.