Unfinished;

Inspiration

For this project, we took inspiration from stories that we have heard in the news and situations we have seen around us. All three of us remembered hearing devastating stories from many communities where people felt so much shame around their mental health that they were unable to reach out and get the help they needed and ultimately something ended up happening to them. We decided to create an application that would hopefully help people get help regardless of their shame and learn how to regulate their emotions themselves. For design and implementation, we found a lot of inspiration in similar LLMs like ChatGPT, health technologies like Medeo and applications with interesting design such as CoStar.

What it does

Our mobile app Unfinished; offers users a safe and secure outlet to discuss their troubles without judgement. Users have the ability to journal, chat with an LLM or simply receive personalized affirmations based on their chat and journal history. Unfinished; is designed to be a companion that helps users get through their mental struggles without feeling shameful by discussing their issues with another person. The user can interact with the app however is ideal at the moment as Unfinished; offers a write-only, read-italics_and_italics-write, and read-only function.

How we built it

This app was mocked using pen and paper and the initial design was made on Figma. The app started development using JavaScript, React Native, Node, and OpenAI's GPT 4o model. We used expo to test the app on our phones while making changes to the code, and used GitHub to make collaborative changes.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was that we overestimated the time we had and could only implement the chat function before the deadline. Unfortunately, we did not have the time or resources to finish the journal or affirmations functions. However, we hope to continue developing Unfinished; and implement those functions in the future, as well as other features we are interested in developing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All three of our team members were completely new to programming with Generative AI before this project so it was a major accomplishment for us that we were able to implement a LLM for the first time within such a short time frame. We are also very proud of our design for this app as we think it is very cohesive and intuitive for the user. We spent quite a bit of time ensuring that our interface would be exactly as we envisioned it and feel that it turned out very well, so we feel quite accomplished with that.

What we learned

Again, since none of our team members had worked with Generative AI before, we learned how to integrate those APIs. Some of the tools we used for the first time were react-native and openAI. Additionally, our experience coding IOS applications prior to the hackathon was very limited so we learned quite a bit about how to develop those apps during this experience.

What's next for Unfinished;

We hope to continue to develop this application and finish implementing all of the functionalities we were excited to offer. All three of us found passion in this project and want to continue working and developing on it until we are satisfied and can hopefully offer it to the public. We feel as though there is a shortage of similar software for similar audiences and hope that Unfinished; can be used to help those in need who do not know how to ask for help.