Mental Health Cat Buddy

Your cat buddy, Nikolai

Inspiration

We looked at the themes and mental health caught our eye right away because we recognize the importance of mental health and how intimidating it could be to reach out for help sometimes. So we wanted to create something that was a companion-type that also lets users check in on themselves.

What it does

Our app has a host of features like a sleep tracker, water tracker, personal journal, emotion/stress tracker, exercise tracker, social interaction tracker, and a meditating app. It gives the user prompts and quickly responds to their input and gives feedback. For example, the emotion/stress tracker asks the user how they are feeling and listens to their response and returns some friendly feedback. The water tracker tells the user the recommended amount of water a person should drink, lets them self-check on their water intake, and also see a list of benefits to drinking enough water. It also has a meditating feature that allows users to set how long they want to meditate and it guides the user through a meditating cycle. It does this thru appropriately timed prompts and messages.

How we built it

We built this project using VS Code, Python, and the collaborative technologies of Github

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we ran into at the beginning was setting up Github for everyone. Setting it up brought a lot of issues like being unable to clone repo's properly and committing. However, we eventually solved the issues and carried on. Another challenge we ran into was readjusting to Python. All team members hadn't written python for over a year and we were all used to languages like Java and C++ so we were writing for loops that Python laughed at in confusion. After a few minutes, however, we were able to get used to it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Something we are proud of is making something pretty functional even though it was everybody's first hackathon. We had no idea what to do or how to go about doing things but we were able to set up Github properly and collaborate to make a nice, friendly companion app.

What we learned

We learned how to set up Github properly and deal with commits, pulls, and merges. Also, we learned the basics of Object-Oriented-Programming in Python because when we previously used it in courses, it was very basic and had no OOP aspects.

What's next for Mental Health Cat Buddy

As for what's next, we initially wanted to have a GUI and deploy it as a web app but we ran out of time so that is definitely something we would look into for next time.