House of Health

page 1 home page, start survey
page 1 survey
page 2 survey
page 3 survey
page 4 survey
page 2 home page, organization list

Inspiration

We have family members that live in Merced and each of them are suffering as a result of loneliness and disparity from isolation as a result of the pandemic. When they do have people keeping them company, they will put those people over themselves, which results in severe detriment of their own health.

The pandemic has isolated many later-in-life women from their families or those that would usually care for them, which can have significant negative impacts on mental and physical health. The challenge of this project is in helping later in life individuals, mainly mothers, to recognize the signs of elder abuse and to help them stand up for themselves and give them the tools to make the situation right. We have been seeing these problems for quite some time and solving them could mean addressing many elder abuse cases in our community and improving their quality of life significantly.

What it does

The House of Health is an innovative solution designed to help elderly people to reach out to the resources and help they need when facing mental health issues. The friendly-for-beginners system allows the public to navigate our page in a very simple way which is ideal for people who have little understanding of how to search on the web. Our developers have composed a survey in which elderly people can answer several questions for screening and then our system will look for all resources in the area based on eligibility and specific mental health issues. The list of resources are based on the responses and is a gateway or connection between the elderly and non-profit organizations that are willing to help people combat with main causes such as isolation and loneliness.

How we built it

We build the webapp by using the following tools: Visual Studio Code, Github, HTML. CSS, JavaScript, SCSS, and JotForm API.

Challenges we ran into

A member in the group was not familiar with ubuntu, so the installation required some time from part of the group in order to set up and be able to start with the contribution. We also faced some issues with pulling and pushing the code from Github and connecting the visual studio code to the page for the beginner-member in the group. There was also a difference in the time zone since not all members are residents of California. One of our members has a three-hour difference (Eastern Time) so meetings and discussions were harder to plan as usual. We also faced various technical challenges when coding the actuarial web app. Since we learned new skills, it was hard to implement them into the web app, We also faced a lot of small tedious bugs throughout the process. We also did not 100% complete the project, we still translate the page and surveys to different languages. We also had to create a javascript code that will generate a list of providers based on the answers that the user enters. And we also had to add more questions to the questionnaire.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the accomplishments that we are proud of is the fact that we learned new skills when creating this project. We were able to effectively use some coding tools that we never used before in our web app.

What we learned

We learned how to use Linux Ubuntu, web development skills and how to collaborate via Github.

What's next for House of Health

In the future, the project will be able to expand to different places, not just Merced County. Developers will also have the opportunity to add more segments to the survey so it can have more resources for the users. The web app functionality can also be used for other purposes not just for our specific theme.