Stress Sidekick

Meditation Timer
Birds Noise
Home
Music
Breathing Exercise
Rain Noise
Forest Noise

Inspiration

Stress has been ingrained in modern-day life, especially in kids as they are bombarded with high expectations. Unfortunately, many people lack the mechanisms required to cope with it. The idea of the Stress Sidekick is to help people deal with stress and help them combat mental health.

What it does

The Stress Sidekick is a multi-purpose website that helps people cope with stress through meditation strategies. It can guide the user through deep breathing exercises with an easy-to-follow indicator. Secondly, it has a built-in 10-minute timer to help the user track how long their mediation session is. Lastly, the Stress Sidekick has a built-in music feature. This allows the user to listen to peaceful noises so they can meditate in a relaxed mood. The music option includes the sound of rain, birds chirping, and forest ambiance and they are all played on loop. All these features together are the ultimate package for beginner meditation.

How we built it

First, we created a mockup of the web page using photoshop. Once the layout was established, we used html5 to create the skeleton of the website. Then, css3 was used to make the website look nice and move the text and buttons in place. Javascript was also used for the animations of the breathing exercises and for the timer.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges while creating Stress Sidekick primarily included cosmetic choices with minor issues with functionality. Opting for a minimal design while also maintaining a level of complexity for the website initially felt difficult; however, once we were fixated on the features of the website, the design fell into place. The colours chosen like blue and indigo were based on what we and most people find as calm and peaceful. Some issues with functionality that we overcame were the implementation of audio for the peaceful sounds section, we opted for mp3 files that loop once they reach the end of the 1-2 mins. The other issue was creating a circle that would smoothly expand and shrink simulating a breathing exercise a user can follow, some simple javascript code helped with creating the animation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have been working on a website collaboratively. This is our first time working together on a website and we are proud of how well we worked together and divided up the work.

What we learned

We learned many things throughout this hackathon including collaboration skills and web development skills. We improved our collaboration skills by familiarising ourselves with GitHub and we improved our web development skills by attending the Lyon Hacks workshop and practising.

What's next for Untitled

We see ourselves adding more functionality and polishing the Stress Sidekick in the near future. Possible improvements include allowing the use of the timer on different pages on the website and allowing the user to edit the duration of the timer. Furthermore, we would like to add a feature that tracks the user’s sleep schedule and recommends adjustments as a way to help them reduce stress.