infoMH

Inspiration: Mental health has been stigmatized as long as we can remember. The hardest part is that there is no outlet for normalization. We have people in our lives, even ourselves perhaps, who deal with mental health issues and so our inspiration was our care and concern for them. We wanted to create a special environment where they could feel valued and supported. Somewhere where they are able to talk about their conditions, medications and more without the lack of understanding and education from the other side.

What it does: This application allows for a number of features that help make it a support social application. The features include: search, forums/groups, emergency contact, and profile. The search feature allows for the user to look up things such as medication, city and condition from a database. The whole idea is to allow them to get a better idea of these things. The medication search provides essential information on medication based on keywords, information such as chemical composition, side effects, dosage, etc. The city search allows users to look up support centers/therapists near them, i.e. their city. The condition search acts like the medication search in providing essential information about the condition, such as its symptoms, stressors, etc. All of these search options also allow users to find groups/forums that discuss the topics. The groups/forums tab focuses on the social support aspect. It allows users to communicate in a moderated platform, where they can discuss their own views and experiences on whatever is being discussed. The emergency contact page allows users to have a safety in terms of someone to reach, in case they need someone there or the emergency services. Users can add in their person contacts as well as local official contacts and they can hit contact buttons for whomever, as they need. Lastly, users have a personal profile with their basic information, such as conditions and medications. However, throughout forums and chats, users will appear anonymously as random names for the safety and privacy of users.

How I built it: Currently, we developed the application through Bubble.io. It uses coding without coding, so we were able to build this by using the click and drag features, such as buttons and textboxes. In order to make things happen, we had to designate a workflow for all of the functions and features. For example, we had to design a workflow for what would happen when someone clicked on a button, such as go to the next page, search something or even log out.

Challenges I ran into: We spent a lot of time trying to code this application ourselves. I would say almost 28 hours of the coding time. We created a python application using PyCharm and Kivy. We were completely new to both the language and framework. We started off strong, learning as we went, watching views and tutorials. However, we ran into hiccups and according to time, we moved to bubble.io so we could show our product interface, regardless of having the hard code behind it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of: We're proud of trying out python and actually making parts of the application, even though we had no prior knowledge of it, whatsoever. We attempted to learn something new, in a time constraint. But it was an attempt regardless and that is something that we are proud of ourselves for. Another accomplishment is getting the bubble.io up and running given how much time we put into the python route.

What I learned: We learned a lot about how we should go about demonstrating products and creating applications. We also learned a little bit of Python. This was our first time developing applications so we learned what we should include and not include. We drew up schematics and developed our final goals. We also learned a lot about each other and our working habits. Although, we would stay up on phone call all night, we discovered that one of us works better during the day and the other during the night, so we are going to be more prepared for the future.

What's next for infoMH: We are going to run back to the python development that we left and finish it. We hope to get it done by learning more and trial and error. In fact, we are hoping to publish the app so that we can see it in action and understand the true complete process.

Built With

• bubble