Inspiration
Inspired by a TED Talk, one of our members imagined how much better the world would be if everyone knew how to manage everyday stress, anxiety, and depression. This gave her the idea of creating an app aimed just for that— to help anyone handle their negative thoughts to lead happier, more fulfilled lives.
What It Does
Utilizing mobile app technology, Float helps its user improve their mental health by understanding their emotions and suggesting credible, psychologically proven cures that are fun and interactive to the user, which they can use to immediately improve their current mental well being. The app first encourages a daily input, allowing the user to reflect on the day they've had or are currently having. By allowing the user to reflect on their day, it encourages the user to think about how they are feeling and their psychological health.
The app focuses on four major issues in mental health that a majority of our society deals with on a daily basis: stress, depression, anxiety, and anger. Whenever the user feels particularly bad, the user can figure out specifically how to cure their psychological troubles. Float is intended for everyday use, to aid the user in improving their mental knowledge of their own psychological needs.
Float is not a substitute for a qualified medical professional however and if a user is experiencing a psychological breakdown, they should seek help immediately. Float offers an alert feature, whereby the user can press the alert button to send a text to contact their emergency contacts if they are having a panic attack or are having thoughts or contemplating of suicide.
How We Built It
Our team used HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery Mobile to create our front end and Firebase as our database. Our alert function was created with the Twilio API to text emergency contacts.
Challenges We Ran Into
Our team experienced the major challenge of choosing functionality vs design. As our first Hackathon, we weren't as experienced with the design of web interfaces or UX/UI, so we decided to use jQuery Mobile as an easy solution. We realized that with jQuery Mobile, the design of our web app was not ideal for our intended audience and wanted to implement a more appealing environment. After many hours trying to make jQuery mobile aesthetically pleasing, with help from a mentor, our mentor recommended that we switched over to HTML and used Bootstrap for our CSS. After realizing that we would not have enough time to implement the changes with Bootstrap because our Firebase was already implemented in jQuery, we opted for the more functional option: jQuery Mobile. Again.
We also encountered trouble with Firebase because we were not familiar with using it as a database. Even after going through the JavaScript web guide, we were still completely lost and had to ask the Firebase sponsors to teach us how to use it.
Accomplishments That We Are Proud Of
Even after our challenges, we are proud of our web application and were able to accomplish many goals on our to-do list. We are all very proud of the teamwork and creativity that we were able to bring to this project. In creating this project, we were all able to get out of our comfort zone and explore different aspects of hacking that we weren't able to before. This project may not have not have been the best, but we all put our best sleepy efforts into it and are proud of what we made.
What We Learned
We split our project into three: front end, back end, and research, and we all participated in all three of these aspects and learned a lot by going out of our comfort zone and working on things we normally wouldn't. Firebase was a favorite for one of our members because she had never used Firebase and in this project went from knowing nothing to being able to implement our apps own database. We all explored these aspects of web development and learned a lot abut what not to do.
As our first Hackathons, we also got to experience Hackathon culture and learned all about different companies and APIs that we could implement into our projects.We crucially realized that prioritization is key in Hackathons and not to take on a load that we cannot handle.
What's Next for Float
We hope to make Float come to life by fixing out design by redesigning it, strongly paying attention to UX/UI. Our goal is to turn Float into a non-profit, hoping to introduce Float to everyone, and making everyone's own mental health a priority in their lives.To do this, we are going to look for the next step to make this into a reality and search for funding options for our non-profit.
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