A story of struggle
The COVID-19 pandemic has had deleterious effects on the mental health of all of us, especially that of healthcare workers and other busy people who had/have to work through the fear of contracting this deadly disease. Personally, I have witnessed this in my mother who led the infection control department in one of the largest hospitals in Saudi Arabia through the pandemic. During my calls with her from Canada, it tore my heart seeing how stressed and hurt she was but not being able to be there for her. At the beginning of this hackathon, Brett and I were determined to utilize this great opportunity to create a tool that can be helpful for such busy people who lack the time to keep track of their mental wellness.
CHIME is a mental health framework that believes there are five requirements in life. Connectedness, Hope & Optimism, Identity, Meaning, and Empowerment. This framework looks at having good relationships and being connected to other people in positive ways, the hope of being motivated to change, positive thinking and valuing success. Our identity question is pointed to look for a positive sense of self, and our meaning question was designed to look for people who have a meaning in life and feel they're able to meet their social goals. Our empowerment question asks if you feel that you have control over life, and is a good way to get a positive or negative response from the user.
Currently, the app is a proof of concept in our natural language processing API, and was an opportunity to learn some front-end development frameworks and JavaScript. In the future, a database will be implemented alongside radar graphing techniques to provide a unique insight into a user's well-being based on responding to a dynamic group of questions each day. Each question will correspond to one of the categories of CHIME.
I believe the first thing this hackathon has helped me learn was project management. I had to discuss with Brett our ideas and plan what we can complete in the timeframe we had. Then, we had to discuss what each of us can contribute to the project, then we divided tasks among us. Second, I learned a great deal about frontend coding since it was my first time ever doing frontend. I used React, which I learned from scratch by watching the workshop from Gear Up week, to create our web app. It was also my first time coding in JavaScript. Brett used Express.js for the backend webserver (API). He also integrated sentiment analysis into the final product. This was Brett's first time using Express.js. Overall, we both had a great learning experience at HacktheNorth2020++
We had many challenges along the way, the biggest of which was connecting the backend and frontend together. We struggled with sending the user response in the form to the server for analysis. However, after many hours and lots of research, we were able to do it successfully.
We are very proud of what we have learned and what we achieved here this weekend and we are encouraged to participate in more hackathons in the future. We are also very excited about our app "Sentimetre" and will be working on it further because we truly believe in its value and utility.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.