Inspiration: The University of Pittsburgh provides short term counseling for Pitt students, but lacks in supporting students when it comes to long term counseling. Not only that, but the health center at Pitt provides only one psychiatrist for over 19,000 undergraduate students. Lastly, Pittsburgh currently hosts several different universities which makes it difficult for college students to find an available mental health professional that fits their needs. Because of this, we wanted students to have an app that gave them easy access to mental health resources.
What it does: It aims to connect Pitt students with mental health professionals that are taking new patients. To do this, TheraPITT matches up their insurance, therapy, and any other preferences they have. In addition, the app features provide education on insurance, risk-self care assessment, and other resources within the community that they can utilize.
Challenges we ran into: We found it difficult to implement back-end software. Despite this, we did code some back-end functionality on other software that we hope to implement in future iterations with more resources and support.
Accomplishments: We accomplished our goal of creating an all-in-one mental health app that connects Pitt students to close resources. To our knowledge, there is no app like this that is accessible and easy to use when it comes to mental health resources.
What we Learned: Through this challenge, we learned about design, app-flow, user-experience, restrictions that come with building an app. Not only that, but we learned how to work as a team and learned the process of prototyping.
What’s next: We hope to continue to refine our product (taking out bugs, minimizing crashing). We hope to create a solid back-end that has a robust search-engine, that provides accurate and faster results. We think this app is very beneficial and can be extended to other universities.
Built-with: We built this app with proto.io and Java.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.