NightOwl

Inspiration

While thinking of ideas, both of us noticed an often untalked about, but very relevant topic that overtakes the lives of many; sleep insomnia/trauma. Through research and personal experiences, we saw the millions of people who struggle with falling asleep at night, and instead stay awake thinking of negative, dark, and stressful thoughts. Because all of us live such busy, and incredibly fast-paced lives, when we go to finally sleep at night, we can't help do anything but the opposite. When our head hits the pillow at night, our brain slows down and we micro analyze every bit of stress and worry. We knew that we had to create an app that helped those who struggled with this, in an accessible way, which is how NightOwl was born!

What it does

NightOwl is an app that helps people with anxiety, stress, PTSD, and more! There are helpful methods, games, audiobooks, sleeping sounds, journaling, and more in the app to help the person sleep, cope with nightmares, night-waking, etc. The sleep sounds help the user to better fall asleep, having noises such as white noise, ocean sounds, piano sounds, etc. The journaling section of NightOwl allows the user to write down any thoughts that might be keeping them up, and lets them express their feelings/get negativity & stress off their chest. A calming games section can also be found, where the user can play soothing & uncomplicated mini-games. A resources section can also be found with access to online sources, and a geolocation tracker which the user can use to search for mental health resources and more, all in their vicinity.

How I built it

We built this app using Flutter, using the language Dart, which allows for app making across IOS and Android platforms. We used a lot of Youtube tutorials, Flutter and Dart documentation, and we had about 1 million tabs open in order to help with our errors and coding!

Challenges I ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges! This was our second hackathon ever (first for one), and our first time using Flutter/making an app. Learning the language as the hackathon progressed was very difficult and stressful, as there were many errors in my code we encountered and little time to fix them. We also were not able to finish everything we had planned on doing, which was disappointing because we would have loved to keep on building onto this app, especially because we were both in love with the idea and progress we had created!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Some accomplishments we are proud of is actually being able to finish the demo and submit the project! Especially because we are so new to app-making, and hackathons in general, it was awesome that we actually had an end project that related to something we were so passionate about! NightOwl has given me insight into a larger world of coding and tech, but also how much can be done with this tech, and the possibilities to help others with this are endless!

What I learned

We learned how people with such issues deal with many different things, and sleeping is a big part of that. People who struggle with anxiety, and stress, experience not being able to go to sleep, night-waking/staying asleep, and sleeping in. People who struggle with PTSD, experience all of that, plus nightmares. We learned about techniques that can help people get over nightmares.

What's next for NightOwl

Both of us are incredibly infatuated by the idea we came up with, and we will definitely keep adding onto NightOwl, especially because we are so passionate about what has evolved into. We never thought that we would become so attached to something, but as we kept developing and creating NightOwl as the hackathon went on, we realized that we definitely need to keep working on it, and make it even better than what we came up with during this challenging and fun time crunch! :)

Built With

• dart
• flutter