Mental Metric

Inspiration

As college students, we know how difficult it can be to manage stress and deal with the whirlwind of emotions in college life. However, stress and emotion management can become even more difficult for neurodivergent students. Various conditions can make it harder to process, understand, and keep track of emotional well-being. As a result, we created Mental Metric, a comprehensive emotion and mental health tracker designed to provide quick check-ins and personalized recommendations for mental wellness. With a focus on emotion management for neurodivergent users, we aim to increase inclusivity and accessibility to mental health wellness and support.

What it does

There are several features to this web application. The initial page is a check in form, asking the user to select an emotion (multiple choice), rate their stress level (from 1-10), rate their happiness level (from 1-10), write something positive about their day, and write something negative. The first three prompts serve as metrics for emotion tracking, while the last two serve as quick journaling practices. This ensures that the user can develop regular emotion checking methods without it becoming a long and tedious task. After submission, the user can see their dashboard, which shows the results of recent submissions, personalized recommendations, nearby mental health resources, and updated graphs displaying stress and happiness levels from previous submissions. The personalized wellness tip recommendations are based on an algorithm incorporating the users' emotion and stress level responses, and incorporate suggestions for activities the user can do to manage their emotions and stress levels. These activities also consider a neurodivergent perspective, with unique recommendations tailored towards managing emotions with neurodivergence. Users can also return to the check-in page, or read more about the application in the About page.

How we built it

This application was built from scratch using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. We initially built the check-in form, then added components to the site as we saw fit through HTML and CSS. The data processing and personalized recommendations were all done in JavaScript, with inputs and outputs connected to the HTML webpage.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time extensively coding in all three of these languages, so it took some time for us to figure out how to build a tool from scratch, add various elements, and make it user-friendly. There were many technical errors to work through, but we managed to overcome with patience and perseverance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of being able to code such a useful web application from scratch, and learning how to do so along the way. We are also very proud of generating ideas and being able to implement them with our new knowledge.

What we learned

We learned a lot about JS, HTML, and CSS. We also learned how simple, well-designed tools that truly focus on user needs, can be very useful to empower accessibility.

What's next for Mental Metric?

We hope to incorporate more features into the dashboard, such as personal product recommendations, to encourage the user to establish even stronger mental wellness routines.