Harkie

A helping hand to take you from abyss to bliss. This platform provides services & features to overcome psychological distresses.

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Inspiration

This rise in the degree of psychological distress in terms of–Depression, Anxiety and Stress among the adult population in India during the strict lockdown period was much steeper compared to normal which itself is no less dangerous for the masses.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the otherwise masked problems, mainly Depression spreading among masses , sometimes even leading to extreme risk-taking behaviours–including suicidal tendencies.

It is observed that the main reason behind such disorders was people not sharing their problems and grievances with someone and also keeping themselves chained in negative thoughts leading to stress.

In such scenarios , one can feel relieved by letting the emotions out through various mediums , and also by spending some time watching or listening to inspirational content and take themselves to a positive space.

This inspired us to make a platform which has particular features and content which can help people to escape negativity and bring in them the confidence and strength to lower down the psychological distress.

What it does

This Project aims to provide services as content and features for targeted audiences to help them overcome negativity. This would act as their virtual companion.

The Application would have features which enable users to express themselves, has content that can emotionally stabilize them & motivate them and also they can get personal attention for advice.

The app has an anonymous posting feature which lets users write down their thoughts, feelings,events in certain words and post it anonymously without fear of being judged.This will help users with a sense of relief.

The application also contains a variety of exclusive videos available which users can access anytime to get some needed help in boosting morale.

There is a section of Live sessions too,which will be a sub platform bringing live talk sessions from some exquisite personalities and also the general public sharing their experiences with various issues; users can gain valuable insights about tackling general or specific issues.

Also, Users can take advantage of the private sessions feature to interact with the experts associated with our platform by paying a nominal fee. They can have their doubts cleared and get insights from professionals. These experts will be available according to schedule and will also be registered with the platform.

There is also a section for written content , named the 'write-ups' , which contain some insightful articles from authors about various walks of life, depicting the values and making readers visualize things with a different perspective.

All these features combine to make an integrated platform on which one can spend some time and find themselves far away from psychological distress and gain that little push or motivation to have a positive attitude towards things.This will certainly help in bringing down the number of individuals who somewhat feel lost their way and feel depressed.

How you built the project

The project started with the basic idea of a platform that helps people overcome psychological distresses such as Stress,anxiety & Depression.

Then the features or services that can be provided to serve the purpose were discussed in which the degree of the prevalent problems and presently what is been done to tackle that were taking place was taken into account and most convincing ones were finalized.

Now the User Interface was designed with the help of prototyping softwares ,keeping in mind the category/types of users using the platform.

After finalizing the designs, these were coded and tested at local devices.

React-Native was used for the front-End development of the project.

For smooth and hassle free linking of npm directories yarn package manager is used.

Install yarn in your system.

npm i -g yarn

Clone the repo and to install all the dependencies, run:

yarn install

To Run the application in development mode(currently build and optimised for android application)

yarn run android

Here many react-native libraries were used, which were installed using yarn package manager

React Navigation

yarn add react-navigation

Redux

yarn add redux react-redux

React-native elements

yarn  add react-native-elements

react-native-vector-icons

yarn add react-native-vector-icons
react-native link react-native-vector-icons

React Native Paper

yarn add react-native-paper

Now for the backend part , Cloud Firestore, Firebase Authentication and Firebase Storage were used

After registering the Application with firebase in the Firebase Console

install firebase services in the project

 yarn add @react-native-firebase/app

yarn add @react-native-firebase/auth

yarn add @react-native-firebase/firebase

Meanwhile ,the changes were also made dynamically in the application according to the feasibility of the design or certain feature.

Meanwhile ,the changes were also made dynamically in the application according to the feasibility of the design or certain feature.

Challenges we ran into

The major challenges faced in the project were -

  1. To find the right software for User Interface Design in terms of usability, so that the prototype could be generated quickly.
  2. To keep each member of the team on the same page.
  3. To combine all the works done by each individual into the finished product especially the implementation part which was coding the finalized designs.
  4. To get a third-party opinion on the work to make positive changes to the project.
  5. To think about the best features one can add, and optimize the features and project at various levels during the development ,so that deadlines could be met.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1.Secure login. 2.Anonymous posting. 3.Session bookings. 4.Video content display. 5.Linking professionals with people.

What we learned

There things learnt from this project includes -

  1. working as a team on a project, with a calculated plan.
  2. working under the pressure of meeting demand of completing the project before deadline, classic real-life scenario.
  3. applying the technologies and skill acquired to think of an idea and create a project on it that solves real-life problems.
  4. being part of a real life development environment like situation at a modest level i.e. right from the idea to implementation & whole workflow.
  5. There should not be a tunnel vision while working on new ideas.
  6. The implementation should be as dynamic as possible to incorporate some changes that are necessarily required.
  7. There can be different perceptions to a single scenario for individuals while working with a team .One should try to try to be on terms with others in case of development to avoid breaking workflow.

What's next for Harkie

If given more time, Some features could be upgraded and also some new ones could be introduced, thus providing users with more resources. These are -

  1. Introduction Of messaging feature : Users can have conversation with other users anonymously based on their location ,if they permit the application to access their location.
  2. Some of the live sessions will have a fixed number of attendees to enable interaction with the speaker , enhancing the experience .
  3. Giving opportunities to users to have their articles included in write-ups sections, so that they can contribute towards the platform too, thus increasing the interaction.
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