Inspiration
Motivated by the negative impacts of air pollution in our parents’ home countries India and Pakistan, we decided it was imperative that the citizens of all countries have a way of improving their mental well-being while also embracing a more sustainable lifestyle to benefit their local communities. The concept of tracking air quality isn’t uncommon, but the intersection of mental health in our app, MentalAir, will be a solution to the correlation that higher air pollution contributes to a lower happiness score.
What it does
Our app’s creation is rooted in the fact that the countries with the highest air pollution have the lowest happiness score, so the app contains information for selected countries that demonstrate that correlation but is hypothetically applicable to major cities in all countries. When you choose your area, the app will lead you to three links: “Daily Air Pollution Update”, “Mental Health Resources”, and “Reduce Your Footprint”. The daily air pollution update leads to a section that provides users with a map and index scores of how bad air pollution is around the city based on data from various sites. The mental health resources section will contain the location of the nearest and top-rated mental health clinics, psychologists, and psychiatrists in your city. The reduce your footprint section will have alternative routes through the visualization of different train lines connecting your city. This section will also have helpful tips based on the air condition on that specific day and mental, respiratory, and cardiovascular health information. We will also have “Back”, “Home”, and “Help” buttons on each page to guide users in navigating the app.
How we built it
We centered the development of the app through a lens of accessibility with the difficulties of people living in developing and third-world countries in mind. Before this creation, we web scraped a site (https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=BLI) and created a pandas dataframe with relevant information regarding countries’ well-being and air quality. We then manipulated the data to sort the countries in order of highest happiness score and associated their air pollution score with it. A data visualization depicted how air pollution negatively impacts life satisfaction through a trendline. We utilized UI/UX to demonstrate the data collected from web scraping and created an app prototype in the Figma web application. We wanted to create an application that made it easy for individuals to visualize the data connecting how air pollution plays a role in mental health. Our daily air update section was made possible through the data on https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map/mexico/mexico-city
Challenges we ran into
Finding data that correlated air pollution and one’s happiness or state of well-being was difficult considering those two topics have never been intersected, but I am glad we persevered and made the connection. Also, cleaning our HTML dataset was one of our biggest challenges because each row of text was split between either a class_ = “Data” or “Data2” so I had to create two different “for” loops and two lists that had to be zipped together. Lastly, visualize the data within the app and make it easily understandable for individuals from different countries.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of our data visualization which provides a concrete image of how air pollution negatively impacts life satisfaction. There are around 33 data points with varying scores but the trendline provides us with the negative correlation we expected and you can click on a specific point and see their score for both air pollution and life satisfaction. Since my partner and I are not well-versed in UI/UX design, we are proud of our determination to learn the basics and mesh those skills with our passion for data science. Our goal was for our application to be understandable by anyone who comes across it, which we believe we accomplished through a simple color palette and relatively simple language. Furthermore, we are proud of our desire to raise awareness for both mental health and pollution, as they are both issues that resonate deeply with us.
What we learned
Through this whole process, we learned the skills associated with web-scraping and also the beauty of data through visualizations like scatterplots with trendlines. We learned that there are more correlations in our world than we could ever imagine, especially regarding mental health and sustainability. In essence, we pushed ourselves to learn new skills such as UI/UX design that enhance the power of data science and analysis, making it more easily understandable for others.
What's next for MentalAir App
As the usage of MentalAir expands, we hope to have major cities in all countries and expand the language options embedded within the app. Feedback will be crucial in making the app more simplistic and accessible since we weren’t able to touch on every nuanced issue with the interpretation and usage. Overall, I hope this app will contribute to a net positive for reduced air pollution, which will in turn provide the citizens of this Earth with a more positive outlook on life.
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