Mental Health (SPARK From Home 2020 - Hackers United)

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Inspiration

One of the group members shares a personal connection with their relatives suffering through dissociative identity disorder. It is very difficult for these people to socialize in public as their change involves experiencing a disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, surroundings, actions and identity. People with dissociative disorders escape reality in ways that are involuntary and unhealthy and cause problems with functioning in everyday life. This project was taken up on behalf of this personal connection to deeply understand and help solve this disorder.

What it does

We wanted to create an app that would educate others about DID as well as show the victim's different personalities so family, friends and other people around them know what is happening, how to deal with it and where to get help. As such, our app is based around creating new personalities and storing them where they can be searched for again and looked at. Every time a victim of DID is encountering a new personality, they can simply go onto the app from the prompt of a family member or friend and fill in the info about the new personality. The app also has built-in information about DID such as what it is, various forms of it, symptoms, how to reduce stigma and much more. This can be used to spread awareness and educate others who have not heard about DID. Finally, the app shows nearby community resources that help DID patients. The user can press "Get Direction" and the app will show directions to the address from their current location.

How I built it

After a tremendous amount of research, we read many personal stories from DID patients and read articles from physiotherapists on their opinions for this disorder. Thereby, my team and I came up with a plan to build a prototype of this app which helps track personality. Nobody else is doing this as we are only business. We strongly believe this app will significantly change DID patient’s lives as they can keep track of all the personalities with one click of a button. We’ve built this prototype on MIT APP Inventor as a trial run so we can visually display our ideas and update/modernize the app as feedback is given.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge was splitting the work evenly and having appropriate timings to work on it. Since it is summer and a weekend, many of us had to go out with family which made it difficult to work on at the same time. But, we managed to split the work and finish the hack during different times since only one person can edit at a time. We compromised and completed things smartly. Otherwise, our mental health topic was very interesting as we had no challenges faced while working on it.

What I learned

We learned about the disorder in-depth as this targets mental health in a very severe manner. Forgetting yourself and people you love with a blink of an eye is very horrific and the fact it can happen anytime unintentionally. We do not want people to go through this disorder alone as our app creation makes a change and allows these people to have confidence in life with self-personality control.