Brain Boost

Brain Boost Logo!

Inspiration

We wanted to create an app that would be able to address teen's mental health issues in the face of a lack of engaging, feasible options for teens to manage their mental health.

What it does

The app allows users to create an account and login to their account in order to create a localized area to save their thought journals. Users can enter any number of thought journals that they want per day, with the aim of entering a thought journal at least once per day. Users will also be able to access past thought journals to see their growth over time and how they felt in previous entries. Additionally, Users will have the option to click on the Resources tab to find a list of reputed mental health resources that they can access and use. With the main feature of this app being the thought journal, the app will be a great way for users to manage their mental health without the use of professional mental help as journaling has been scientifically proven to help mitigate feelings of anxiety, depression, and form an easy way for people to approach their feelings and emotions in a calm and controlled manner.

How we built it

We built the app using XCode and Swift. Within the app, we used the Firebase database in order to create a login and sign-up system with verification.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges when creating the login page - since we had to save the user's login information, verify it, and allow multiple accounts to be created, we needed to find a way around these challenges. With the usage of Firebase, we were able to circumvent these issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of what we've been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. Since most of us have pretty basic knowledge of XCode, we felt proud that we were able to combine our individual strengths to create an engaging user interface along with accurate backend code to create the foundation of our app.

What we learned

We learned that it's important to have resilience and patience when working with app development. As new versions and syntax pop up, many past forms of knowledge may become outdated, which easily pose new challenges. It is important to not get frustrated in the face of these challenges, and we learned that by taking things calmly as they go, we were able to achieve a higher level of success and actually have fun building this app.

What's next for Brain Boost

Brain Boost's next features will allow it to become much more personalized for the user: 1) Resources ChatBot - though our current Resources tab simply gives a list of hyperlinks, we aim to expand the app so that this resources tab includes a ChatBot that walks the user through their feelings and symptoms, then gives a list of slightly personalized links that fit the user's needs - whether they are dealing with anxiety, depression, or more. Since most users, especially teens, may not be able to get professional mental health, simply gaining help in finding accurate resources to cope with their mental health will be a big step towards supporting our users. 2) Semantics Analysis - Analyze the journal entries to create a thoughtful reaction based on their entries, attaching moods to each entry based on the semantics of the details of what went good and bad throughout the journal entry. 3) Calendar Widgets - In order to make it easier to access past journals, we want to make the past journals page into a calendar that allows users to easily go back to past journals based on the date, and within that date, the times any journals were entered.