Thought Bubble

Inspiration

The inspiration for Thought Bubble was from our focus on mental health during the current COVID-19 pandemic. We have recently realized how damaging the pandemic and self-isolation to stay safe has been on countless individuals and their mental health. It is particularly difficult to receive help for one's mental wellness during these times due to both the inaccessibility of mental health professionals, as well as avoiding help due to the negative stigma surrounding the issue. After COVID-19, it is likely for many individuals to seek the help they need and/or desire, thus making it necessary to help filter and help individuals with less severe instances of poor mental health.

What it does

Our website, Thought Bubble, allows for users to create journal entries to express their day-to-day struggles as a form of writing therapy. In addition, the website is used to log these entries and examine them over time, particularly by looking into negative wording used in entries and by discouraging their use while showing the user their progress. This in itself can be used as a method to help identify individuals that may require professional assistance, and suggest resources to them.

How we built it

We incorporated the use of FireBase to have a database of users with their corresponding journal entries being referred to by their user IDs. Several of the user's journal entries are displayed on the main webpage, with the ability to flip through their entries in chronological order. As for progress, we made us of a dictionary API to look for synonymous wording to that of a previously generated bank of keywords in order to count the user's own levels of negative speech.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges during the development of Thought Bubble, particularly implementation of FireBase, in addition to the overall use of HTML and Javascript, as we each had minimal experience with the languages.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the few but big steps that we managed to take in developing Thought Bubble. Although we lacked a lot of technical experience with databases and creating our own website, we managed to figure out how to set up and begin to work with each.

What we learned

All of us have learned a lot, including programming practices, as well as the background processes that underlie our code, including the implementation of databases and APIs.

What's next for Thought Bubble

Thought Bubble may see in the future the implementation of a forum section, where users can interact with one another who are going through similar struggles, or even interact with health care professionals!

Built With

Created by

I worked on the front-end, and helped somewhat with the back-end code, particularly using past knowledge of RESTful APIs. Most of the front-end was intimidating as I have previously only worked with back-end code.

Truman Be
Back-end Developer
I worked on the back-end of the website. I haven't used JavaScript in a while, so it was a bit difficult to figure some of the more difficult concepts until I began to remember what I've done in the past.

Tashan Maniyalaghan
I helped work on the front-end. I have never worked on a programming project before and didn't have knowledge of JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 prior to this, so this was a challenge. However, I contributed where I could and learned a lot from this experience.

Manvinder Sohal
I worked on the both the front-end and back-end. I had to learn html and javascript which was a bit difficult.

Balraj Sadhra

Updates

Truman Be started this project — May 02, 2020 07:20 PM EDT

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