Mindful

Inspiration

Mindful was created to provide innovative assistance to people who are struggling with their mental health. About 44 million Americans do not have access to health care, which inhibits many from getting the proper mental health care they may need. We wanted to create a solution that provides resources and wellness activities for those who do not have the means to go to counseling or receive help from a professional.

What it does

Mindful allows the user to keep track of their mental health by taking selfies and writing journal entries. This data is run through facial recognition and text semantic analysis libraries to determine the emotion of the user at the time and produces activities and resources to help the user achieve a healthier state of mind.

How we built it

Mindful is built with Flask as its backend and AngularJS as its frontend. Microsoft's Face and Text Analysis APIs from their Cognitive Services suite are run in Python scripts to analyze image and text data to predict the user's emotion.

Challenges we ran into

Misleading documentation for the APIs led us on the wrong track for interfacing the Python scripts to the AngularJS through Flask. We spent quite a bit of time with some mentors to determine the root cause of the problem and the solution.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We were able to battle the API and get the Python scripts to completely interface with the website. We are proud that we were able to fully implement our original concept.

What we learned

It is very important to read the full documentation, and even more important to do a ton of research to make sure you understand how it works. Just that will save you a lot of time and trouble in the debugging stage.

What's next for Mindful

Currently, Mindful is still young and a proof of concept. In the future, we hope to expand Mindful with greater support for journal entries, more activities, and even a graph API to allow the user to track their mental health over time and make sense of how they are feeling at certain periods, and why.