Inspiration
The COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps the most catastrophic infectious disease modern medicine has seen. With seemingly lower lethal rate than other virus like Ebola, the rapid spreading rate of COVID has led to millions of infections throughout the world and led to complete breakdown of many medical systems around the world. As countries struggle to contain the virus, many chose to lockdown the country, enforcing mandated stay at home order. Suddenly, people lose the ability to communicate with each other and many people’s mental states are put into challenge because of this. Lack of conversation, care and financial resources have challenged the best of us. There is thus a desperate need to develop an application that allows people to release some of these stresses through doing something relaxing like writing journals and get notified when the app detects that the user's mental status is suffering.
What it does
Our program is a smart diary writing iOS app that allows the user to record their everyday life in the form of journal entries. The app includes basic functions like write journals, update journals, delete journals, and search for old journals. However, it also automatically detects for excessive appearance of negative thoughts and notifies the user if there is a need for them to seek help. Moreover, for more accurate and intricate writing analysis, we also developed a website where the user is suggested to go to if they want. The website is more sensitive to the user's writing style and will provide more accurate results on whether counseling services is necessary.
How we built it
Through mining various articles and diaries online that include both positive mental state and negative mental state, we learn the key phrases and words that indicate a typical person’s mental state. Then, we implement these key words into a search function into our iOS and web application and determine whether the person is in a mental breakdown.
Challenges we ran into
Determining which key words and phrases to use is a challenging task as both spatial and temporal information are often needed to validate the meaning of the words. Without explicit use of state-of-art NLP models, we carefully learned out these parameters to use in our model. Another challenge is the difficulties encountered during the iOS app development. Coding a multipage and multifunctional smart application Xcode proved to be extremely challenging, and we had to learn many new knowledges on the spot.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of collaboration we have put into developing this application. We are also proud of being able to develop functional iOS and web applications that achieve most of our original goals.
What we learned
We learned a lot about software development which was not covered in our bioengineering curriculum.
What's next for Mindful
We are ready to deploy the applications into real world use and help people deal with the stress of not just the pandemic, but also the increasingly challenging daily life struggles. Correspondingly, we will offer better consoling service for these people in need and integrate the service into our program. We also aim to improve our mental status determination program to make it more intelligent, accurate, and sensitive.
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