Inspiration
Internet Addiction, while not yet codified within a psychological framework, is growing both in prevalence as a potentially problematic condition with many parallels to existing recognized disorders. How much time do you spend on your phone a day? On your laptop? Using the internet? What fraction of that time is used doing things that are actually productive? Over the past years, there is seen to be a stronger and stronger link between an increasing online presence and a deteriorating mental health. We spend more time online than we do taking care of ourselves and our mental/emotional wellbeing.
However, people are becoming more aware of their own mental health, more open to sharing their struggles and dealing with them. However the distractions of social media, games, and scrolling are constantly undermining our efforts. Even with an understanding of the harmful nature of these technologies, we still find it so difficult to take our attention away from them. Much of the media we consume online is built to be addicting, to hook us in. How can we pull ourselves away from these distractions in a way that doesn’t feel punishing?
What it does
Presents an audio visual stimulation that allows the user to become more aware of their “mind space” Lo fi audio and slow moving figures A timer that resets everytime keyboard or mouse is moved Program awards the player a new plant for every time the timer comes to an end
How we built it
UI/UX design using sigma Frontend using HTML, JS, and CSS AWS Amplify for deploying our webapp Github for version control
Challenges we ran into
Initially wanted to use react.js and develop our server backend ourselves but since we are inexperienced, we had to scale back our goals. Team consisted mostly of people with backend experience, it was difficult to convert to front-end. Furthermore, Most of our members were participating in their first hackathon.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're very proud of learning how to work together as a team, and manage projects in github for the first time. We're proud of having an end product, even though it didn't fully meet our expectations. We're happy to have this experience, and can't wait to participate in more hackathons in the future.
What we learned
We developed a lot of web development skills, specifically with javascript, as most of our member have never used it in the past. We also learned a lot about AWS. We're all very excited about how we can leverage AWS to develop more serverless web applications in the future.
What's next for Mind-Space
We want to develop Mind-Space to play more like an idle game, where the user can choose their choice of relaxing music, or guided meditation. As the player spends more time in their space, different plants will grow, some animals will be introduced, and eventually what started as just one sprout will become a whole living ecosystem. We want to add social features, where players can add friends and visit each other's Mind-Space, leveraging AWS Lambda and MongoDB to achieve this.
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