MoodMeter

Background used in MoodMeter

Inspiration

Throughout our lives, it's easy to overlook the importance of self-reflection and mental health. The MoodMeter project is designed to empower individuals to take control of their mental health through regular self-assessment and actionable insights. The idea is to create a user-friendly yet powerful tool that encourages users to check in with themselves regularly, assess various aspects of their mental well-being, and receive tailored suggestions for improvement. By providing a visual representation of their mental health status and offering personalized recommendations, the application aims to make mental health care more accessible and engaging.

What it does

The MoodMeter wellness app asks you 20 simple questions, carefully constructed to assess and evaluate the user’s mental health and wellness levels. These questions focus on different aspects of mental health, such as sleep quality, work-life balance, physical activity, emotional connection with friends and family, stress management, and more. Based on the values that the users give for each question a mood score is given to the user. Mental Health suggestions will be given to the user based on the user’s inputs, these suggestions are aimed at helping users enhance their mental well-being in areas where they might be struggling. If the user's score is relatively high, they receive encouragement to maintain their good practices. The app has an interactive user interface, making it very easy for users to be able to use the app. Not only that, this app leverages modern technologies like Tailwind CSS and Chart.js for data visualization to ensure a smooth and engaging user experience. Our app has many interactive and beneficial features that we have incorporated into this app. It includes a slider that users can use to slide through to choose between a scale of 1-10 for the questions. We have a gauge that shows users their score in a visual format, making it more accessible for users who have difficulty reading.

How we built it

We built this app using the Python language and used Flask, a lightweight Python web framework. We used this due to how simple and flexible it is, allowing for the quick setup of routes and handling of HTTP requests. In terms of the front end, we used HTML to construct the front-end content of the web pages, creating a user-friendly interface for interacting with the app. CSS and Tailwind CSS were employed to style the app, ensuring a clean and modern look. Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework, allowed us to quickly build responsive and visually appealing components with minimal custom styling. For dynamic elements, such as sliders and interactive features, we used JavaScript. JavaScript enhanced user interaction, allowing real-time feedback on slider values without needing to reload the page. For data visualization, we used Chart.js, a popular JavaScript library, to create the gauge chart displayed on the results page. The gauge visually represents the user’s mental health score, offering a clear, intuitive summary of their assessment. By leveraging Chart.js, we created a dynamic and interactive visualization that updates based on the user's input, enhancing user engagement and understanding of their mental health status. For templates, we used Jinja2 templates provided by Flask to dynamically render content on the server side. This approach allows the results page to display personalized feedback, including the mental health score and tailored suggestions for improvement.

Challenges we ran into

During this hackathon, we faced a lot of challenges, as building a mental health app was something completely new for us. However, we were able to overcome these as a team and create solutions. Some of the challenges we ran into were:

Finding the right questions to ask users. This was difficult as we had to research, plan and find which questions to ask our users, making sure that one question did not overlap in topic with another, and covering areas like sleep quality, work-life balance, physical activity, emotional connection with friends and family, stress management, and more.
Finding how to implement features like the gauge, the slider, and the chart. Using CSS, .js, Jinja2, Flask and other tools was challenging as we had to do a lot of research, and trial and error to implement these technologies. Integrating the backend and front end was also difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating an app for the betterment of people: This app isn't just a hackathon submission, it's an app that could save lives in the future. We created this app knowing that after this hackathon, we will work on this app, making sure this app will transform people’s lives in the future: That is our accomplishment.
Another accomplishment that we are proud of is working together with a group of four people, four different people with whom we have no experience working with. Overcoming this was a difficult challenge, as we had never talked to each other before, and had to break the ice before starting on the idea and the code. However, we are proud of the fact that we were able to break the awkwardness pretty easily and communicate with each other very easily.
As high school students who have little experience with coding, being able to pull off such a project was a great deal, something that will be a memorable experience for all of us. We are extremely proud of the fact that we were able to come up with such a meaningful idea and execute the idea into reality. This accomplishment of ours has not only given us great memories and experience, but also has given us the boost of confidence that we will be able to replicate such success in other hackathons, projects, and even in our work life.

What we learned

As a team we have learnt a lot of things during this hackathon, mainly one is the importance of research, cleanliness and implementation of code. We realized how important research was when writing code, as research was needed when finding out libraries, different tools and functions. Cleanliness of code was also one, this meant keeping the code clean and efficient, as well as writing comments for functions to help relay what each piece of code was for, helping save a lot of time during editing and cross-checking the code.
We also learnt the importance of balancing the front-end and back-end of code. This meant writing code in the back-end and producing the equivalent front-end code for the project. We had to plan ahead of time what our user interface would look like, what code to write, and whether it was feasible. This was a very important lesson and is something we will take away for future hackathons and coding projects.

What's next for MoodMeter

As we have mentioned earlier, MoodMate is an ambitious project of ours, and an app we plan on adding many functionalities to. This includes more accurate and user-oriented questions, a weekly and monthly report, a personal reflection space to write how the user felt that day, and MoodMate Chatbot for users to let their feelings out, and a steak system to motivate users to use the app daily.