Moody

Inspiration

Our inspiration for Moody came about from wanting to have a more personalized social media experience with the goal of enhancing our relationships with people we value. We also wanted a way to keep connected and help take notice when other people are feeling down, especially when life gets busy. iOS widgets seemed like the perfect area to explore our idea with as the technology is relatively new and no major apps have put a big emphasis on it.

Other social media platforms also currently aim to hook the users and get them to stay on the platform for as long as possible. This often deteriorate our sense of self worth with the constant comparisons we make against the lives people seem to paint.

What it does

Moody's main area of focus is a custom widget where it displays the latest status update from the people you care about. You get to choose a text status and photo image to submit. This data is then transferred to our backend where we the have run two machine learning algorithms to analyze both your text and your facial emotions to determine your current state. If you're perceived as being in a bad move (either depressed or angry), Moody will automatically notify some of your close connections that maybe they should try and catch up with you sometime!

How we built it

Our front-end was built using Swift/SwiftUI natively for iOS. We have two separate backends: Firebase was used for storing user information and assets, while we have another which runs our machine learning algorithms using Python/Flask and hosted on Heroku. Our emotion detector algorithm uses a pre-trained model which we implemented on our backend. For our text sentiment analysis, it analyzes the tonality of the sentence and also the word choice in order to identify the mood.

Challenges we ran into

A couple challenges we ran into were the difficulty of integrating an iOS front-end and Firebase backend with our Python backend. Apple does things a bit different where some features such as including push notifications would require our team to create custom servers. These were all challenges that we would not have faced if we decided to go with creating a web application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that we were able to move beyond web development and make something which we think is really unique and useful through the use of iOS widgets.

What we learned

We learned that it was really hard to get everything completed on time when dealing with new technologies that were also not particularly suited for the Hackathon environment. We can see now why most companies being with hybrid frameworks like React Native because they allow for apps to simply be developed faster. That being said, iOS development is a very valuable skill that we are very happy to have learned!