Go With Your Flow.

Inspiration

Periods affect nearly half of the world's population, yet menstruation is still highly stigmatized across the world. While apps currently exist to track women's periods, we felt that a more comprehensive approach was needed, integrating a period tracker with other features to support women on their periods.

What it does

Our website offers this integrated approach to supporting women on their periods. The website currently includes a page to support women who just got their period for the first time, a period tracker, a map of reproductive resources in the area, information about relevant political issues in the area, and a way to engage online with other women who may be able to offer support and advice.

How we built it

We built our website using the web builder on domain.com. We developed a period tracking algorithm in java that is linked via GitHub. We utilized the Google Maps API to embed a resource map. We also utilized the Google login API to allow users to login with their Google accounts. We used Facebook Social API for commenting on our website. We created a Facebook page that is linked on our website.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges while working on our project. One major challenge was figuring out how to integrate APIs into domain.com's web builder, a challenge we have not yet solved. For example, we can display the Google login button but it does not link to the proper page when clicked. Another challenge was developing an accurate algorithm for tracking periods, accounting for edge cases such as leap years.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have a functional website that provides a preliminary prototype of our goals for the website. In addition, we're proud to have developed java code that can accurately predict the start and end date of a period.

What we learned

We learned how to use domain.com, how to use HTML (a little), and how to adapt to challenges!

What's next for Go With Your Flow.

We have many goals for our next steps with Go With Your Flow. First, the website resources are currently incomplete. The most glaring problem is that, while we have backend code for the tracking algorithm and we have a calendar displayed, there is no algorithm to allow the calendar to communicate with the tracking algorithm. In addition, we currently used a very simple algorithm to track periods but we believe a machine learning algorithm would be much more effective. In addition, the political engagement page currently has static information specific to North Carolina. We would like this page to eventually allow users to search a zip code and access relevant political information based on location. In addition, the social page is not currently functioning. In addition, we would like the resource map to include resources all across the country and potentially the globe and to display resources most relevant to the user's location. Another major goal is to incorporate more medical resources, including a way to track and recommend any medications, connect women to doctors (possibly via a livechat), support for symptom management, and mental health support. Lastly, the end goal would definitely be to develop an app with these functionalities in addition to the website.