Project Mercury

Inspiration

Now, approximately 180 million Americans suffer from one or more chronic illnesses. Beside symptoms associates with their diseases, people suffering from different chronic illnesses face the common challenges of loneliness and additional mental health challenges. Our goal is to combat this loneliness by creating a social site catering to fostering community for people with chronic illnesses.

What it does

The Mercury Project would have many features of a mainstream social media platform. Users can create a profile, make blog or forum post to generate discussion on any topic of their choice, and like and comment on posts. Base on their interests, users can follow, friend, and chat with other users with similar tastes and interests. A key feature of our website is our search and recommendation system. To create personalized recommendations, our website have a database full of books of movies. We categorized each title based on the type of diseases the work discusses, and whether the book has a positive or negative tone to match user's mood and preference. Our machine learning algorithm would then create personalized content suggestions for each individual user. We also designed event planning and marketplace features to allow users to support each other's works and causes.

How we built it

Python, Wix, JavaScript, Domain.com, Wikipedia API, Hugging Face Roberta, Amazon Review API

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulties using Wix and integrating Python with it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to create a functional website in such a short time.

What we learned

We learned to develop a website, which none of us was familiar with before.

What's next for Project Mercury

For next steps, our goal is to complete and improve existing functions, improving our search function and allow for advanced filtering, implement a user-based review system, create personalized user profile, create a crowdsourcing and volunteering system, and much more!