Rendezvous

Inspiration

A recent Cigna study which surveyed 20,000 U.S. adults 18 years and older using the UCLA Loneliness Scale found that most Americans are considered lonely. Alarmingly, the trend seems to only be worsening: the study revealed that Generation Z (adults ages 18-22) and Millennials (adults ages 23-37) are lonelier and claim to be in worse health than older generations.

Approximately 1 in 6 adults in the U.S. suffer from a mental health condition. When examining the different issues affecting people with mental health conditions, there is a consistent part of the pathology: they also suffer from loneliness.

Loneliness has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than obesity.

As members of Generation Z who have seen how easy it is to become lonely, we decided to build an app that helps support the techniques that help us avoid loneliness - an app that makes person-to-person interaction, which the study found to be the best way to reduce loneliness, become easier.

What it does

We built an app that takes the pressure to initiate contact with other people off of the user and bolsters communication. Using Rendezvous, users can set up "call groups" with their friends or acquaintances that schedule a group call at a set time and day. The app will automatically give users the option to join the call at the scheduled time, meaning no one has to take the first step to initiate the call. For example, a group of friends from home can easily hop on a call at 7:45 every Tuesday and Thursday when they're already on their laptop or phone and get the notification from Rendezvous.

From students going to college, to graduates entering the workforce, to families who live in different countries, Rendezvous gives an easy, low-pressure way to maintain communication with loved ones and keep people from feeling lonely.

Building it, and next steps

We used react-native to build out the application, to allow us to easily deploy the application on all platforms. We want Rendezvous to be available to anyone who needs it. Once we finish building out the application, we hope to launch Rendezvous to both the iOS and Android app stores by Fall 2019.

Built With

• react-native