SelfHelp

In a fast-paced life such as ours's,mental health is being neglected so much to the point that almost 30% of teenagers and working adults are showing signs of anxiety.That's where "SelfHelp" comes in.

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Inspiration

As someone going to anxiety, I know better than anyone how it feels. Everyone has different ways of showing anxiety, some people get anger outbursts, some people start crying spontaneously, etc. As for me, I get panic attacks which make it difficult for me to breathe for some seconds. As a student in software development, I had the luxury to build exactly what I wanted but I put it off because of the exhaustive college curriculum and internships. This Hackathon gave me the exact 36 hours I needed to build something that would not only help me but also the other millions of students going through the same problems that I do.

What it does

Basically, this app contains everything that one would need to calm himself/herself down. It takes into account every mood swing a person can get and almost every indoor/outdoor activity one can do to help himself/herself.

Many apps on the market have a UI that has such high contrast and such brightness that it gives a sense of panic to a person whenever he/she opens it. Instead of calming a person down, it does the exact opposite. I envisioned an app that would start to have a therapeutic effect as soon as the user clicks on the app, including the login and registration. This was achieved by using a smart mix of color and images that have a soothing effect on the user.

It has 4 basic options that one can use, all of them help people of all age brackets. Saying that we also build a little support option especially catered to children to help them relax.

The 4 options are:

  1. Meditation 2.Music 3.Yoga 4.Doodle

How we built it

The app uses and Java [Android] primarily. It was build using Android Studio and Firebase. For the color palettes, I referred to some research papers to see the relationship between colors and mood.

Challenges we ran into

The main issue was we had to condense a vast amount of pointers and information into an app that has to be so simple that even a child or an adult under panic attacks can operate.

I initially dismissed the idea of having music thinking that any person would have music stored in their phone, but on further research, I found that like colors , music and scenery can also help the mood, so I added 4 songs that induce a sense of calm. Since this is a working prototype, I only needed 3-4 songs in the app for proof of concept.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

At around 12oclock, 4-5 hours before submission I asked my friends to act as a target audience and asked them for inputs. To my surprise, the app was very well received and with their constructive criticism, I was able to make some important minor changes. One of those ideas was to simplify the login process as much as possible. Their logic was that if a person was going through severe anxiety no one would wait for the login process to get complete so that they would be able to use the app. For example, in my case, if I was in the middle of a panic attack I wouldn't like to waste a minute or two trying to login into the app. Taking their advice I made sure that the user to log in as fast as possible and once logged in he/she would be directed to the app every time unless they delete user data. The reason is that I am planning to continue working on the app even after the Hackathon is over and I want to implement a feature of data migration like once your use your account details on some other phone all your data is migrated and stored there as well for your convenience.

What we learned

I learnt that just thinking about building something and actually building something is very different. It takes a lot of effort to build even a small application let alone an app that has to be meticulously made to serve a niche audience taking a lot of real-world research into account. But if it helps even a small target audience the level of satisfaction received is very high.

What's next for SelfHelp

Like I mentioned above I would like to continue working on the app even after the Hackathon is over. I plan to implement a proper media player option for the music and plan to improve user customization options as well as a feature to migrate data between phones. As a Data Science and Analytics student I came to a sudden realization that to make the best app you don't always have to have a killer idea that has the most efficient ML algorithm or the best Neural Network, sometimes we just have to listen to what the user wants and deliver exactly that, because sometimes simplicity is better.

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