Happiness Habit

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for creating "The Happiness Habit" app comes from the critical importance of mental health. We believe cultivating a positive mindset through mindfulness, gratitude, and positivity can tremendously impact mental well-being. Our goal is to encourage users to focus on the positive moments in their day, whether big or small and to reflect on them regularly. By building a habit of happiness and optimism, we hope to help people improve their mental health and live more fulfilling lives.

Applications

The Happiness Habit not only helps users cultivate a habit of looking for happiness in their daily life, but it also has potential to support healthcare and mental health. For example, healthcare professionals can use the app as a tool to help patients practice gratitude and positivity, which can complement other forms of treatment for mental health conditions. The app can be used in therapy sessions or as a tool for patients to use at home to help promote their own mental well-being. Overall, "The Happiness Habit" has the potential to be a valuable tool for healthcare and mental health professionals to help support their patients' mental well-being and cultivate a positive mindset.

What it does

Every day, the app sends a text message to the user asking them to reflect on something positive that happened in their day.
The user responds to the text message with their positive thought or moment.
The app takes the user's response and saves it on a website.
The user can revisit their happy moments on the website anytime they like.
By focusing on the positive moments in their day and building a habit of gratitude and happiness, users can improve their mental health and well-being.

How we built it

To develop "The Happiness Habit" app, we started by creating a dynamic calendar webpage that could be accessed by users anytime, anywhere. We integrated Python Flask with Twilio, a cloud communications platform, to enable the app to send daily text messages to users asking about something positive that happened in their day. To facilitate collaboration on the project, we used Replit, a cloud-based code editor that allowed multiple developers to work on the codebase simultaneously. Finally, we implemented Python Flask and Twilio using Visual Studio, a popular development environment that enabled us to build and test the app efficiently. Through this collaborative process, we were able to build a robust and user-friendly website that promotes happiness, positivity, and mental well-being.

Challenges we ran into

While building "The Happiness Habit" app, we encountered several challenges that required creative problem-solving. One major challenge was integrating Twilio, a cloud communications platform, with the app to pull information from text messages and save them to a file. This required extensive testing and debugging to ensure that the app could reliably collect and store user responses. Additionally, working with Python Flask, a popular web framework, proved to be challenging at times, particularly when connecting backend components to the front-end user interface. Finally, we had to figure out how to connect the backend JavaScript file reader to the user response text file, which required careful attention to detail and a deep understanding of how the app was structured. Despite these challenges, we were able to build a robust and effective app that promotes mental health and well-being.