Lynk: Battling the Loneliness Epidemic

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  Here is a screenshot of the flow between the pages in our app.

Inspiration

Aditi is a Crisis Counselor on the Crisis Text Line as a trained volunteer texter to support emotional and mental well-being needs. When asking people “do you have someone to talk to you?” the most common response is “No one understands me. My friends and family do not get what I am going through.” When researching more about this topic, we saw the prevalence of mental health conditions on college campuses. Moreover, Surgeon General Murthy declared loneliness as an epidemic and created an extensive 82-page framework where he said that social connection is the key to battling the loneliness epidemic. This is what led us to create this app to connect so they understand they are not alone.

What it does

Lynk is a community where students diagnosed with mental health conditions can connect and find strength together. College mental health centers can purchase this product and provide it to their patients. These patients will then be able to swipe right/left on other profiles to connect with them. They also have access to their journals and self-assessment surveys to monitor their moods/thoughts and for their clinician to monitor their progress. Overall, Lynk is like a “prescription” for social connection because this improves patients’ ability to fight against stress, anxiety, depression, and more.

How we built it

As Biomedical Engineering majors, we have minimal coding experience. However, our major supports us in having extensive problem-solving skills, market/user research, and prototype creation which we have learned through our classes and other experiences. Therefore, we used Adalo, a no-code app creator, to develop our app. We built this prototype from scratch, with all the elements that we have thought of including design and function.

Challenges we ran into

One obstacle we faced was how to minimize cyberbullying/abuse on the app without invading someone’s privacy. This took us some time to figure out, but we ideated an AI codeword alert system to keep our users safe. Whenever the AI system sees any harmful words such as “killing” or “hitting” in a conversation, it automatically flags it and lets the clinician know so they can monitor it. Users will have a disclaimer about this before using the app too to prevent this as much as possible. We made sure to think of a “Report Abuse” feature as well to maintain a safe environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have built a functional app and the progress we made in understanding the specifics of what it takes to create a StartUp! Along with figuring out the idea, we have to understand the real passion/purpose behind the product and how to implement it with the users in mind. We feel accomplished in understanding our problem, market, users, and most importantly, our “why”.

What we learned

Throughout the process of creating this app, we have learned how to research business needs for our product. We also improved our problem-solving and project-management skills, which will all help in our future endeavors!

What's next for Lynk: Battling the Loneliness Epidemic

Next, we will dive deeper into seeing if this idea could potentially work with customers such as mental health clinics. Showing them our idea and seeing their thoughts and advice will be a great way to research customer discovery. We hope to keep continuing our journey of destigmatizing mental health!

Built With

• adalo