Mindfriend

Hosted with https, which means you could use it at https://mindfriends.org Built with webRTC and requires camera access How it fits the theme of sustainability: Mental health is a very important aspect in sustaining a healthy life.

Inspiration

The issue of depression has been rising due to lockdown, unable to talk to friends, and uncertainty of the future. And because of that, we see a increase in suicide rate. Many of those suicides are tragic and could be saved if these young people have someone to talk to. This is what motivated us to build mind friends, an application that provide a way to connect depression patients, young people, and mental care doctors through real time webRtc and matchmaking.

What it does

Depression patients and therapist can use this app to pair up and help each other. Here's how it works: Depression patients could choose to be paired with another depression patients(they can select their specific symptoms and to be paired with people with that symptom), and if two pairs are found, they will be both send into a webRTC video chat room, where they could open up to each other and comfort each other.

How we built it

We used WebRTC technology to build the video chat, websocket for the text chat and matching depression patients with therapist feature. For front end, animations are done with anime.js and raw css animation.

Challenges we ran into

It is super confusing, frustrating to try to get the SSL certificate for our domian to work, as well as working around Nginx with websocket(forward proxy with websocket is a bit confusing). The biggest challange is implementing WebRTC protocol. We realized that webRtc does not work with the standard security our website has. So we were forced to implement a high level of encryption and security into our website. We also faced problems during the animations of the site, as dynamically switching screens while being on the same page is incredibly difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of the quality of the animations as well as the chatting and video speed. With the extensive use of the websocket technology as well as webRtc, we are able to create real time video chatting for a good purpose, while remaining as modern and sleek as possible.

What we learned

We have learned alot from this project, especially the use of webRtc as well as many front end aspects such as dynamic page switching without redirecting.

What's next for Mindfriend

We strive for more options for people who are in need of help, so we will be adding more and better functionalities as well as options to Mindfriend, maximizing the amount of help the user can recieve.