Inspiration
The inspiration to make such an app came from talking to friends who were suffering from PCOD and wanted to share their story, their problems and wished to have a place where they could just talk to someone and feel relaxed, safe and not judged. They even wanted to make the taboo around the topic disappear and demolish any wrong facts about it, wanted a place where the condition could be normalised and awareness could be spread. So, this is where the inspiration to make such an app came from.
What it does
The aim was to spread awareness about PCOD/PCOS (not only to those who have access to the internet but to everyone!) and help those who already are suffering from this disorder.
So, we made this app, a platform which not only describes what PCOD/PCOS is but also is a safe environment for those who are already experiencing it and need help in overcoming it. This app caters to the needs of one and all. One can learn and enhance their knowledge about the subject, can detect the level of the disorder being experienced, can connect with people who are willing to help and share similar stories, incidents and one can even seek medical help as well through a single portal called MIND SPACE!
The reason behind calling the app, mind space is because this is lighter on the mind, makes you feel well aware and informed and helps you relax in situations where you feel like giving up and need some motivation, this feature is a major future aspect that we will be working on and will add some games, playlists, podcasts in the relax and play game option! All in all this app is a great platform for anyone who wishes to help others as well as help oneself.
Apart from those who have internet access, this app also takes care of people residing in rural parts or people who do not have internet connections or smart phones available by starting a phone calling IVR service which will provide all the necessary details and help that is available on the website.
How we built it
First step to any website or webpage is the basic structure of the pages, the flow of every page, the application UI and design. After a lot of brainstorming we had the basic structure in our mind and so, we went on to search the internet and found really amazing designs and took inspiration from it and designed our own app, then according to the design and requirements of our app, we found the ML model, trained it and then integrated it within our app. Made a chat service by using node modules and a symptoms predictor in which we integrated ML model using flask for the first time taking help from different sources. After making the individual pages, we integrated all of them and finally deployed our application on Heroku.
The Project is live, Check it here!
Challenges we ran into
Making anything new sure has numerous challenges and while there were many small challenges we ran into, the major ones which are worth mentioning include: discovering and finding the correct ML model and the training of the model. This took a lot of time and since our ML model is not under research, there could be a certain range or scope of error in prediction, we firmly rely on further research and implementation of techniques like hyper parameter tuning for better performance. Another challenge was using flask to add ML for the first time and the deployment of it on Heroku, the connection of different APIs together was altogether a hectic and difficult hurdle that we finally passed by great research and by continuous trial and error. It were the team's efforts that made the challenges of the project easy to overcome and achievable!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Though we faced a lot of difficulties, first with the integration of the ML model using flask, we still made it to work somehow but the deployment phase almost made us gave up on our project since it was becoming disappointing for us to not deploy our project and that we wont be able to make the project go live and show it to everyone, but then again we searched for errors and solutions and kept trying and finally found the issue and resolved it. The final deployment and completion of the project is the biggest accomplishment that our team is proud of.
What we learned
The learning experience while making this project was huge, from learning to create comic strips for the front page and to give the portal a better UI, to learning to setup flask and using it in a project, as this was the first time that we were experimenting with flask and node together, ML model integration was a tough yet fun experience. The most difficult phase was the deployment as it took a lot of time and efforts but we finally learnt how to deploy a website built using flask.
What's next for Mind Sapce
The reason behind calling the app, mind space is because this is lighter on the mind, makes you feel well aware and informed and helps you relax in situations where you feel like giving up and need some motivation, this feature is a major future aspect that we will be working on and will add some games, playlists, podcasts in the relax and play game option!
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