Pause

Pause from what the world is telling you but begin with what your true inner beauty is saying.

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Inspiration

We observed that depression affects 264 million people across the world. One of the main reasons is that social media exacerbates mental health problems and allows us to start comparing ourselves to more exciting life appeared on screens. Therefore, we wanted to encourage users to focus on our valuable selves by pausing from what the world is telling you but beginning with what your inner beauty is saying.

What it does

It’s a mobile app that provides three mental care features.

  • Pausing social media app usage allows blocking a certain app for a day or amount of time user’s selected. Once the app has been blocked, when the user tries to access the app or reaches the time limit for the day, we will be recommending other activities according to the user's database.
  • Meditation with soothing audio, users will set a timer and meditate.
  • Journal provides a journaling space where users can reflect and put down their genuine emotions for the day. These data will accumulate and be shown in the dashboard as an achievement.

How we built it

  1. Set a timeline and conducted problem finding, user research, user scenarios, and user flow
  2. Developed the low-fidelity to high-fidelity wireframes in Figma.
  3. We planned a Front-End based app built using React Native that would use a minimal backend API interface for the purposes of login/registration, logout, journal posting/removal/fetching. The backend was empowered with CORS header permissions that allows locally hosted machines to make API calls and perform the requisite functions.
  4. The meditation functionality has been provided with a time selection feature is a rolling scroll, where the user can select a time of their choice. There are additional options to play background music and to discard the meditation sessions. The Call An Expert functionality is primarily for the more vulnerable user wherein they can contact a mental health expert should they feel they need immediate medical mental health assistance

Challenges we ran into

  • Implementing advanced designs into a demo
  • A primary challenge was to allow locally hosted code to make API calls to code hosted on a Heroku server. This was solved by making allowances for CORS headers in the back-end code.
  • The format in which the AXIOS library sends requests had to be matched with the format in which the back-end code was expecting the requests to arrive. We attempted various strategies viz sending request objects, plain text, form-based data.
  • React Native does not allow us to edit native apps on the go. A better option would have been to implement the same using Kotlin etc. Due to time constraints, this direction was abandoned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. The coordination and the teamwork displayed by the group were beyond excellent. This was particularly hard as the teammates worked from different time zones.
  2. The coordination between the front-end calls and the backend API was tough to achieve. That the team managed it nevertheless is testimony to the effort that was put in by each member.
  3. Front End dev was quite involved with multiple branches at each stage. Another challenge was to maintain login data while navigating between pages. This was another feat achieved by the front-end developers that we're particularly proud of.

What we learned

  • Collaboration + Effective communication
  • Figma technique skill development.
  • React Native and integrating it with Django backend

What's next for Pause

  1. Refining features
  2. Developing ideas to bring updated personalization to the app
  3. Considering Implementation of Mental Health support AI bot
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