Pulse

Daily Question
User Responses
Reflection Journal

Inspiration

Pulse is a social connection app allowing users suffering from anxiety, depression, and isolation to anonymously connect throughout their community.

What it does

Each morning, Pulse presents its users with a single, introspective question. Users can answer this question, and at a set time each day receive the responses from all other users within a 20 mile radius of them. Users may also leave notes in their reflection journal, and set the reflections to be sent back to them at a later date. Through this, users can chart their own mental progress, and how their ideas have been informed by those around them.

How we built it

Parse is an iOS app built using Swift. It uses a MongoDB database to store all user responses, which is hosted with Heroku. The Parse API, originally developed by Facebook but recently open sourced, is used to make queries and determine what posts fall into the user's radius.

Challenges we ran into

Many of us had little to no experience developing iPhone apps, so we had to learn multiple backend and frontend technologies entirely new to us. It can become a particularly acrobatic art when you're chasing down error with a few hours to go concerning technologies which you have less than 36 hours of experience with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to develop a fully functional iOS app in a single day! We feel our user interface compliments the app's intentions and provides an inviting atmosphere for users.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned to develop an iOS application from wireframing to back end implementation, and look forward to taking this knowledge to future projects.

What's next for Pulse

While we intend to keep Pulse very simplistic, we will be adding additional user customization features, including setting the color gradient for the app. When scrolling through user responses, the background will adjust to the color of that response's user to further connect users. We intend to publish the application soon, and gradually expand the userbase from Baltimore, to the United States, to Worldwide.