Flourish: Mood Tracker

Text Sentiment Analysis for Tracking and Logging Your Mood with Friends!

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Inspiration

Communication is at the core of our society, but a trend towards online interactions – in lieu of face-to-face encounters, coupled together with social-distancing and covid-19 – makes it increasingly difficult to create personal connections. We were inspired by Newsprint’s ‘replicat[ing] the meaningful nature of face-to-face interactions while breaking down existing digital barriers,’ and as such, we wanted to tackle this challenge by creating a mobile application that can track trends in your mood with a social aspect, which allows users to add their friends and keep in touch with how they’ve been doing, emotionally.

Research has shown that journaling is a great way to manage anxiety, stress, and depression. In today’s day and age, it’s become increasingly difficult, and frankly, archaic to set time aside to write a few lines in a paper journal – instead, people often turn to send emotional text messages to their friends and family. That’s why we created Flourish: a mobile application that keeps an aggregate log of your (and your friends’!) mood, as determined by Google Cloud’s Natural Language API.

What it does

Flourish asks users to input their feelings after a short prompt, akin to a journal entry or text message, in a textbox. ‘Flourish’ is a word often used to describe crops: as such, our application analyzes the text and gives a result on a scale of a sad grape to an ecstatic apple (don’t forget to eat your fruits and veggies!). The fruit measure is given along with a number from -10 to 10, with -10 being very ☹ and 10 being super 😊. The application then graphs out the weekly mood, and users can share their results with friends or add their friends on the application as well.

How we built it

This project was built using a React frontend and a Node Express backend, with Firebase serving as the database. In addition, we used Google Cloud Platform's Natural Language API in order to analyze the sentiment of the journal entries. When we were prototyping the project, we used Figma. The art components (like the little fruit and logo) were done in Procreate for iPad, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop.

Challenges we ran into

The largest challenge was definitely the integration of Firebase and Google Cloud Platform's Natural Language API. It was difficult integrating everything together, especially as it was our first time using these technologies. Other challenges we faced included figuring out how to prototype a project like this -- neither of us had ever done something like this before, and we weren't familiar with Figma's interface.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re only a two-person team: it’s Alice’s first ever hackathon, and Key’s second ever hackathon and first completed/submitted project. So frankly, we’re just really proud that we were able to finish the project with all of the major user stories we wanted to have, without descending into a state of sleepless insanity.

Neither of us had experience with UI/UX or formal design work either, so creating everything from scratch was a fun challenge. We wanted to make this application visually cute as well, and we’d like to think we did a pretty solid job at that!

We’re also proud of the fact that we were able to use Firebase and figure it out, and that we were able to add some pretty fun and cute animations in JavaScript. Regarding Firebase again, we’re really happy with the result that we could use it to log not just a single user’s results, but also that different users could be ‘linked’ together when you add a friend.

What we learned

We learned that it’s incredibly ambitious to try and get all components (haha, see what I did there?) of an application done between two people in <20 hours (more like <12 hours because we value our solid 8 hours of sleep. Sleep is important!!!).

In terms of individual aspects of the project, we learned how to use Figma for prototyping, Firebase for setting up the backend of a project, and that JavaScript animations are cool.

What's next for Flourish: Mood Tracker

We’re proud of what we were able to complete in this short time, but in the future, some things we would change and add are: • Update the design of the application – nicer animations! (Moving fruit, like an actually crying grape) • Account verification with email • Add resources for supporting mental health in addition to the results page • Further statistics for results (ability to filter statistics) • Speech-to-text integration • Friend manager (see your friends, add or delete them easily)

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