Inspiration
Although self-care is an important aspect of human thriving, people need to thrive on community care too. Our goal is to create a space where people can take ownership of their efforts to strengthen communities. We were inspired by Bullsconnect and the decentralization Web3 concept.
What it does
Feel closer to yourself and the community around you with Emnet. This iOS app utilizes cutting-edge blockchain technology to reward users for their engagement in USF campus events and their commitment to personal growth through writing journals.
⭐Connecting with the community⭐
A community's contribution can take many forms; it can be as simple as attending an event on campus to share your vision, goals, or skills with others. With Emnet, users can see what events are taking place on USF campus and earn $BULLCOIN$ for attending them. Users will be able to redeem $BULLCOIN$ for a variety of exciting rewards, such as discounts on goods and services on USF's campus. Users can also be able to trade tokens with each other.
⭐Connecting with yourself through journaling⭐
In addition to taking ownership of building the community, we want users to feel appreciated for taking care of their own mental health. Studies have also shown that journaling can reduce the frequency of intrusive depressive thoughts, help college students who are vulnerable to depression, and reduce different levels of depression in those diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. With Emnet, users can maximize the benefit of self-reflection through journaling and gain $BULLCOIN$.
⭐Interactive Map⭐
The app provides an interactive map that shows the community's well-being status, what they have been up to, and how they are feeling. With Natural Language Processing, we classify people's emotional states through their journals and add emoticons that represent their moods. All you see are the emoticons, not their profile. It's totally anonymous, and each status is only up for 24 hours!
How we built it
Our app's incentive system is built on the Solana blockchain, providing users with secure and transparent BULLCOIN tokens that can be redeemed for a variety of exciting rewards such as a discount on services and goods in the USF campus area (or anything that promote community involvements).
The backend of the app is built using Python and Flask, hosting on CockroachDB server"less". We then use password hashing to secure the user's password and an encryption algorithm to secure the user's public key for verifying transactions on the Solana network.
The frontend of the app is built with Swift. We utilize SwiftUI for most of the interface. In addition, we use iOS MapKit and CoreLocation to display the map, get user's current location and pin their emoticons.
To connect backend to frontend, we create REST APIs with Flask-SQLAlchemy and call the API endpoints through HTTP requests in Swift.
We also use pre-trained DistilRoBERTa (a variant of BERT language model) as an NLP model to classify the user's emotions via their journaling.
Challenges we ran into
This is our first time interacting with blockchain technology to develop a mobile app. We also ran into some difficulties when trying to create and send tokens with Solana. We also ran into challenges where we connect the frontend to the backend. Though some of us are familiar with Flask and Swift, we never tried to combine them before. Our two backend developers also have 2 backend files that weren't really compatible. We were not able to merge them due to time constraints, but we figured out the solution by running two ports at the same time.
Accomplishments
We're proud to create a solution that enables us to strengthen the USF community.
What we learned
We learned a bunch of new and different technologies!
Roadmap
Some future implementations include:
- Generate smart recommendations to recommend users their potential favorite events and mental health resources based on their journaling history
- Deploy the app on Android
- Letting users earn tokens with a peer support system
Built With
- bert
- blockchain
- cockroachdb
- flask
- ios
- natural-language-processing
- python
- solana
- solana-swift
- sqlalchemy
- swiftui
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