Yana

Inspiration

As serious advocates for mental health, the members of our team decided to take this project on in order to improve the conversation surrounding treatment and support. It is well known that there is plenty of support for mental health awareness, and that a common saying we hear is one to push people into "knowing and recognizing the signs". But what comes next?

It is extremely common for someone to feel isolated or alone with a problem or struggle that they’re dealing with. Often this problem is far too specific to themselves, to the point where the person has convinced themselves that “nobody understands”. Friends of these people become stuck as well, without any clue as to how to speak to and support their friend.

What it does

Yana provides a platform for anyone to speak out about their problems at their own discretion, and only to understanding ears. Users can enter stories whenever they like, detailing their personal struggles and problems that they feel might be too specific or complicated to communicate. Yana's backend algorithm finds the most similar story entries by another user, and connects the two users, who may choose to accept or ignore the match. Once a match is made, both users can see each others' full stories, and even send messages to start chatting.

How we built it

Yana was primarily built using stdlib, with both the backend and frontend written in javascript in stdlib. The backend algorithm for story matching uses "doc2vec", an algorithm that uses the similar "word2vec" to create multi-dimensional vectors from meaningful words within a document or sentence. These extremely specific vector values are compared with each other in order to obtain a score, which is then used to judge the similarities of two stories.

Challenges we ran into

Yana was not the first thing we attempted to create this weekend. Our team, ever full of innovative ideas, had much trouble deciding on a project, and even spend much of Friday on a project that ultimately fell through. Even after starting on Yana, however, the largest roadblock in our way was our group's lack of knowledge on stdlib and javascript, which we planned on using anyway.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Though it certainly proved challenging, confusing, and even frustrating at times, our group was able to push through our limitations and learn new skills in the form of stdlib API creation and Javascript to further our goal of creating Yana.

What we learned

Technically, we were able to pick up many new skills in Javascript, standard library, and more. However, the challenges we faced as a team were able to make us learn the far more important skill of effective team communication. At nearly all times, we were able to work together as a cohesive unit, constantly communicating, sharing, and having fun as well.

What's next for Yana

We believe Yana has an extremely bright future, and there are many ideas we would still like to implement over time to improve the user experience. Some of these include location settings for users to see the stories of others on their same university campus or city, the ability to add more personal user profile information, and much more.

Yana is a project that has convinced us that we can change and improve public understanding of mental health, while helping those in a struggle at the same time.

Built With

• algorithmia
• javascript
• jquery
• mongodb
• python
• stdlib