Inspiration
1 in 5 people personally experience a mental health problem or illness. And with COVID-19, these numbers are only increasing. Having personally experienced extreme anxiety, I always felt like I was a burden to other people when reaching out for help. Motivated by such experiences, we, Out of Box Insights created a platform that allows users to give AND receive help through an interactive web-based application.
What it does
The benefits of the platform go beyond simply recognizing mental health problems by bridging the gap between people that can help and people that want to be helped. The matching algorithm takes inputs from users about mental issues they are seeking help with and returns other users in Firestore cloud database who have listed that issue as a resource they are willing to provide help for. Once users are paired, they are prompted with the Google Calendar and Hangouts APIs to schedule a time to meet. After users interact, they are able to give comments and ratings to build credibility and create a leaderboard that shows the most helpful people for a particular search setting. The results of the Algorithm display user profiles in a list that is sorted by ratings.
How I built it
For the front end of the platform, we primarily used HTML and CSS from scratch. Using features such as drop-down menus, buttons, and more, we were able to create an interactive and user-friendly web application for users.
For the backend, we used Javascript and Firebase Cloud Firestore to create and authenticate users on our platform. This was integrated into our registration and login form and we were able to create alerts when we had multiple users create accounts with the same email since these are unique key identifiers on our platform. We also worked to ensure that some requirements such as, the fact that passwords have to have more than 6 characters, were upheld. Once users sign in, they are able to access our platform, interact with our front-end, and access our services. One consideration that we worked towards was trying to guarantee the privacy of our users since they are sharing sensitive information with our platform. This is something we really tried to keep in mind and we worked towards assigning users a unique hash code so even developers cannot see which user wants help with which mental health problem.
For search, we intend to query into the Cloud Firestore database for user profiles that have the search keyword entered by the user. The snapshot of the database that is returned as a search result will be displayed by iterating through the list of users using JavaScript. In our attempt to execute this approach, we learned that templating our code through vue.js or using express JS would reduce code duplication and decrease production time.
Challenges I ran into
Honestly, we hadn’t used any of the technology that we used for this project before this hackathon but we felt extremely motivated because this idea means so much to us. Thank you for your help and stay safe.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Building a tangible product, giving back to the community, working for over 24 hours for a project that relates to us personally, being able to consider user privacy
What I learned
A lot about Firebase, Javascript, CSS & HTML! It was an awesome experience and every process was a stepping stone :)
What's next for Peer Support Program
With more time and resources, we envision this platform to incorporate the following features: -Google Hangouts and Calender API’s to improve scheduling by providing recommended meeting times -We aim to further explore the firebase functionality to improve the storage and the efficiency of data retrieval and matching from the database. -Building user review system to rank users based on their services
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