TOKEN

Inspiration

We were inspired to create this app by observing how big the issue of alcoholism is in Canada. 19% of Canadians, twelve and older, struggle with heavy drinking. This habit is difficult to break and those who endure it often suffer relapses, are impacted by the stigma associated with seeking help, and have difficult interpersonal relationships. Our app is called TOKEN to reference the sobriety tokens given to individuals in support groups such as AA.

What it does

TOKEN uses location, with permission, and notifies their selected loved ones when their family member enters a bar, liquor store, pub, etc. When the user avoids these high risk areas for certain time intervals, they are given tokens to signify their progress as a reward.

How we built it

We used radar.io to track the user's location and we used twilio to send texts to selected contacts when the user enters a specified zone. We used node.js and express.js for the backend, react.js, react-router, and google-maps-api in the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

The paywalls set by Radar hindered our development with their API - we were forced to only work with geofences. We also had never developed backend code before, so that was a challenge as well. State management was unfortunately an after thought, for which we suffered in Hindsight.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a functional application that can be used to solve real world problems that society is facing today. We are also proud to have created backend code which was a new territory for us, and that we were able to learn many different technologies.

What we learned

Teamwork, time management, and the importance of sleep. Technical-wise, we learned how to create a backend, how to use twilio, and how to use radar.io.

What's next for TOKEN

One thing we would like to add to TOKEN is resources for other forms of mental illness, such as self harm, eating disorders, other forms of addiction, and impulse control disorders. More complex backend, to cater to new users.