SanityStation

Your Mind’s Safe Harbor.

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Inspiration

In our day and age, the youth of society feels like they cannot disclose troubling information to their trusted adults.

Whether it be bullying, or a guilty conscience, the children of today are just not comfortable with sharing news with their parents.

This causes their feelings and emotions to be bottled up, turning them into a ticking time bomb, waiting to blow at the worst possible moment.

Kids need to have a reliable outlet for their feelings where they know:

  • no one will judge them
  • nor will anyone know.

What it does

SanityStation is a website built for people who want somewhere to let their feelings out.
It is a place where one can jot down feelings and emotions without the fear of someone finding their journals.

Features

  • Daily Journal Entry – jot down virtually anything about your day or how you felt
  • Google Gemini-powered LLM – helps users overcome mental hurdles
  • Mindfulness Resources – a collection of popular tips (books, websites, etc.)
  • Guided Breathing Exercises - breathing exercises designed to calm your nerves
  • Daily Mindfulness Challenge – practice awareness and self-conscience
  • Crisis Support Hotlines – in case of dire emergency, all in one place instead of searching the internet

How we built it

  • Backend: Flask (Python)
  • Frontend: HTML for web elements
  • Styling: Tailwind CSS
  • Animations: JavaScript (e.g., confetti and breathing animations)
  • LLM Integration: Google's Gemini API

Challenges we ran into

  • Gemini LLM Integration – we had trouble utilizing the Gemini LLM in a clean and seamless manner.
  • Tailwind CSS – this was my first time using Tailwind, and it took me a while to get the hang of it.
  • JavaScript Animations – the breathing animations were difficult to implement since I don’t have much experience with JS animations.
  • UI/UX Design – the biggest challenge was creating an interface that had a comfy ambience while also being practical, easy to navigate, and genuinely useful.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built a guided breathing animation that turned out really nice.
  • Designed a cozy and inviting UI, perfect for a mindfulness app.
  • Added meaningful features like:
    • Daily journal entries
    • The ability to “go back in time” and view past journal entries
  • Used prompt engineering to get the model to act more like a therapist.

What We Learned

  • Learned how to use sessions in Flask to save the current user even after reloading.
  • Gained experience with Tailwind CSS for clean, responsive styling.
  • Greatly improved our Flask skills, especially with:
    • Sessions
    • Routing
    • Passing data
    • Handling user interactions

What's next for SanityStation

In the near future, we plan to add much more features to our platform, also possibly adding an online forum to encourage group discussions, while also having proper rules in place to avoid bullying. Another possible feature would be streaks, counting how many days in a row someone completed an entry or challenge. This creates a sense of reward and encourages them to improve their mental health.

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