Enhanced Mindfulness: Mental Health

Group member

Xiyah Chang, Kelly Wang, Joanna Yao, Luotong Kang

Inspiration

Everyone in our team is interested in mental health issues, so we chose to investigate a topic that we think is important and relevant to our lives, especially as people became more isolated during the pandemic. We also wanted to utilize this opportunity to work with data and create a data-driven solution with an impact on people who are struggling with mental health.

What it does

The Search Avg. and Trends tab allows users to interactively visualize the trends of popular psychological terms over time and the comparison between the search interest of those terms.

The Mental Health in Workplace tab allows users to interactively visualize whether employees received mental health resources from their company.

How I built it

We choose to analyze datasets related to mental health in the year of 2021 in order to understand insights of COVID-19 effects. By using ShinyApp, we’ve built a website that contains visualizations of our data with sliders and checkboxes. We first selected interesting and useful datasets online and analyzed the datasets appropriately using R, then visualized and summarized with ShinyApp.

Challenges I ran into

When we were doing data pre-processing, we took a while to clean the data based on our research question. It’s also a little bit challenging for us to make decisions about what plot would be appropriate to show our data. After group brainstorming and research online, we finally find our way to tackle these problems.

Working with R shiny also took longer than we expected as we ran into some unforeseen errors.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We managed to learn more about R shiny and build a working interactive data visualization website in a day.

What we learned

The popularity of google searching terms can be interpreted by different stages of the pandemic. For example, the large exposure to vaccines might potentially cause anxiety among people, and the switch to in-person work and school alleviate concerns related to mental health. However, confounding factors like season should also be considered.

We learned that there’s still a lot of people who don’t have access to mental health resources in their workplace, so more effort should be made by companies to help people with mental disorders.

What's next for Mental Health during pandemic

Due to the limit of time, we only investigate part of our survey data. The next thing we are thinking about is using NLP to turn answers of our short survey questions into data we could use. We could also apply more CSS rules to make our website look more aesthetically pleasing.