SafeSpace

Inspiration

Since 2005, there has been an 83% increase in the suicide rates in the black community and despite this alarming statistic, black people don't seek mental support because of the ingrained stigmas surrounding mental health. To corroborate this, research shows that 73% of African Americas believe mental health issues are a sign of weakness.

Problem Statement

Accessing mental health services is daunting and not encouraging for a black person.

What it does

As a team, we have developed SafeSpace, which is essentially a three-pronged approach to solving the problem.

SafeSpace provides a platform for people to connect with counselors
Safespace provides a community for people to talk through and share whatever things they might e going through
SafeSpace provides an accurate emotional analysis of patients during therapy sessions using emotion recognition API

How we built it

Android in Java for the mobile application
Face Recognition API for emotion analysis
React JS for website bootstrapping
Firebase for backend hosting

Challenges we ran into

Setting up the FaceAPI to recognize and quantify emotions
Visualizing the data gotten from the FaceAPI
Rendering the application

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Utilizing FaceAPI to accurately detect patients' emotions
Clean, modern, and user-friendly interface

What we learned

Using APIs
Firebase Hosting
Bootstrapping a website
Mobile application rendering

What's next for SafeSpace

Adding other ways to get data that could be beneficial to making the emotional analysis more robust. Data to be collected would include spending details using Fiserv API, heartbeat motions using Fitbits or other wearables.