Introspect

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  Home screen

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  Our journal entry

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Inspiration

We both enjoy filling out our bullet journals as a way to destress, but it can be cumbersome to fill out a journal entry by pen. We love looking back and quickly look through a recap of all the daily instances of our lives thus far, but more importantly we think its helpful to get an insight of how we were feeling at different points in time.

In the past, people have built mood tracker apps for this purpose, but those apps often require you to fill out the mood yourself. But sometimes its not quite apparent how you were feeling on a particular day. So we thought it would be cool if we could leverage the powers of deep learning to extract information from our journal entries, like sentiment and keywords, for quick browsing and recap.

Furthermore, some people have taken social media as their journaling outlet, such as finstas, but usually those posts are just a quick capture of objectively what they did that day, versus recapping in a more introspective way.

What it does

Introspect is like a finsta but for yourself (not for others as you may feel tempted to please others on a social media platform) to reflect and start being more introspective and measuring your emotional growth. It is a digital journal that tracks the overall sentiment and mood of your entry so that when you look back to the past, you can see how you have felt just by filling out journal entries. It also provides guiding questions to help facilitate a faster and more profound entry, and identifies keywords to automatically caption the title of the post.

How I built it

Material UI and React with AWS Comprehend (for text and sentiment analysis) and S3 and MongoDB and Express

Challenges I ran into

Because we wanted our app to be as detailed in emotions as possible, we had to build on top of AWS Comprehend to measure more specific emotional details from text. We had to research into the psychology of colors and emotions, and what exactly makes a text evoke happiness, anger, love, calmness, anxiety, etc.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We managed to built an end-to-end minimum viable product that represents our foundamental idea and mission in less than 24 hours.

What I learned

Learned that the most important to any project is the initial idea. Also learned a lot about the tech stack we used.

What's next for Introspect

We want to bring it to a mobile platform, since uploading pictures is usually a lot more convenient for people. We want to add more features such as: -Allow user to filter their journal entries by sentiment/color -Have a large bank of guiding, introspective questions that are randomly generated day or day or week to week.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• javascript
• mongodb
• react