Solace

Inspiration

When addressing the topic of Telehealth, our team decided to research the impact of Covid-19 on college students. Through our research, we found that one area we could tackle was mental health, specifically patients dealing with anxiety and/or depression. Due to the inaccessibility of mental health resources and limited in-person counseling and therapy, we decided to create a product that would give students easy access to this piece of vital healthcare through their universities.

What it does

Solace is a mobile telehealth application that provides an avenue to connect college students with their school psychological health centers. The application is equipped with scheduling capabilities, video-chatting for individual and group sessions, messenger/chat option, additional resources for students to access in their own time, etc

How we built it

Using InVisionApp, we were able to sketch out the layout of the application, decide on color schemes and the overall flow from page to page. Then, with Adobe XD, the application was prototyped and tested until the current prototype was achieved. A messenger feature was also designed using React-app for the front-end development and Firebase development platform for the back-end.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was deciding what we could do in the limited time we had. We had a lot of bright ideas and features we wanted on the final design, however, we had to re-prioritize and focus on what we could do in the limited time we had.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to finalize the layout of the application for both the student and therapist platforms.

What we learned

We learned to work together remotely and also new tools like InVisionApp and Adobe XD.

What's next for Solace

The pro-squad would spend more time developing the messenger feature in Solace. We began the preliminary work on the design of the feature however, more work needs to go into user testing in order to collect more data for refining the tool. In addition, a database would need to be created for the application and assuming we are using public and private key exchange for the encryption, we would need to implement end to end encryption as the application would be handling HIPAA data. This would allow us to create a functioning messenger tool that can be featured in Solace.

On the go-team, one thing we would like to do with an extra 5 weeks is collect more data and research. One thing we had hoped to do was reach out to target college services that would use this app and send them a demo or survey asking for their thoughts. This input would be valuable in helping us adjust our business canvas model and doing additional research to fine tune the features of the app. Also, we would like to send out surveys to college students about their preference on receiving mental health services. Furthermore, we want to reach out to medical insurance companies to get their opinions so that we could work out a better, affordable solution.