HowYa!

Inspiration

Across the world, mental health conditions are on the rise. Be it rising job insecurity due to the impacts of COVID-19 or a multitude of other factors, depression is now one of the leading causes of disability. If left unchecked, negative thoughts and emotions often beget a cycle of constant melancholy. Journalling offers an avenue to view our thoughts and emotions objectively, reducing stress and deepening self-discovery. As words flow onto a page, we learn to process our emotions with equanimity by separating them from ourselves. However, journaling - as it’s been conventionally thought of - has lost its appeal with the modern day person. Introspection has become an undervalued activity. And with this decline, so too are its benefits of improved mental well-being and health lost to us. Perhaps our perception of journaling is wrong. Inherently, the intention of journaling is to “pour out” the pent up emotions in our headspace. Journaling, like other forms of self-expression, could be used as an avenue to help others and share experiences. We understand that sharing our raw emotions is not second nature to most, and so, inspired by the trending app beReal, we created a cross-device platform that’s all about communal self-reflection and the connection of people through our emotions.

What it does

HowYa! is not just an ordinary journaling app or social networking platform. Leveraging big data and cutting-edge NLP models, HowYa! encourages self-reflection, openness, and sharing through geolocation and text-based sentiment analysis.

The Journal
We understand that everyone has different perceptions of journaling. Some have a routine of journaling everyday, while others have probably never written a journal before. Based on your level of comfortability, HowYa! recommends goals to help you maximise the benefits of self-reflection. For instance, for beginners who are new to journaling, we set a weekly goal for you to write 2 sentences and upload an emoji reflecting your current emotional state. If you see something that makes you happy, post a quick entry! It’s that easy. Our NLP algorithm analyses what you write in your caption, and determines on a general scale (very negative to very positive) your emotional state.

World Map
On the world map tab, you can view activities that everyone in your location has been up to and how they felt about it. For privacy purposes, this world map is designed to be anonymous. If you have uploaded a caption of something that has made you happy, others can see the activity that has made you happy, but they will not be able to peek into your user profile. The map comes in-built with a custom filter that lets you create specific emotion maps.

Here are some ways to use The Map:

Want to cheer yourself up but don’t know how? Simply visit The Map, create a map filtered by “happy” emotions, and see what activities near you release copious amounts of dopamine!
Spot a scuffle near a street you walked past? Quickly create a journal entry, write a few words about what you saw and alert everyone about the dangerous situation. We’ve trained our NLP model to recognise danger and emergency cases. Users walking home late at night can switch the app to scan for any reports of negative activity and thereby avoid any dangerous areas!

Friends-only Map
Add your friends so that they can view your emotions and what you’ve been up to! This feature is no longer anonymous. You can even optionally choose to share your journal entries with the friends you’re close to, or react to the entries made by your friends. Through our World Map and Friends-only Map functions, HowYa! intuitively brings society together by enabling people to journal more, and play a more active role in supporting one another.

How we built it
We used nodeJS, CockroachDB, and Prisma to build our backend application, SwiftUI for our frontend application, and the Keras Sequential model for our multilayer perceptron Machine Learning model.

Routing and Endpoints
To keep track of user data, journal entries, activities and their associated emotions, we used Cockroach DB as our database and Prisma and nodeJS as our backend to create and access information in the database.

User Experience and User Interface
While building HowYa!, we prioritised simplicity and intuitiveness. We wanted everyone to be able to start journaling without having to spend time familiarising themselves and working against a steep learning curve.

Geographical Map
We used Apple’s MapKit and built an overlay above it to display emotions of people at particular coordinates.

NLP and Sentiment Analysis
In order to process the journal entries written by users of HowYa!, we clean our train-test-validation datasets using word tokenization, and train an NLP model on training datasets. We evaluate its accuracy on a test set using metrics from sklearn and matplotlib. However, we want our machine learning model to run on real time posts that our users journal, not just on a pre-downloaded test set. Thereafter, we run an API to request… cache…. As a whole, our NLP algorithm ultimately processes your journal entry and assesses your general mood on a scale of “Very Happy” to “Very Sad”.

Challenges we ran into

As a whole, most of the setup and development of the app was fairly difficult. We’ve never done mobile development before and learning how to write efficient code was definitely a long and frustrating process.

Given the sheer scale of features of our app, building and making sure everything worked in 24 hours was also another major obstacle. In addition, our app challenges

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We really loved the idea of HowYa!. It was the fruit of hours of frustration, tons of ideas thrown down the bin and a lot, a lot of debate.

We entered the hackathon with zero/close to zero experience with hackathons and zero experience with mobile app development. Learning to piece everything together and make it all work was a painful and incredibly tiring process. Honestly, we probably watched more Youtube tutorials in the past 24 hours than we’ve watched for the entirety of our lives.

Being able to create something that we not only found interesting but also tackled real-world problems and is something we would use on a day-to-day basis was particularly fulfilling.

What we learned

We had the invaluable experience of being able to attend really cool workshops and gain experience developing mobile apps, integrating NLP models and managing big datasets. We also learned about communicating effectively and capitalising on the individual strengths of our team members.

What's next for HowYa

Deployment
We’re looking forward to conducting pilot tests with our friends and families to get some useful feedback. Afterwards, we are definitely looking forward to getting it on the App Store and Google Play Store. To get it ready, we definitely need to smoothen out some friction points and tweak the overall UI/UX of the product.

Additional Features
We’re also interested in adding more functions to our app.

Individuals can upload images and videos at their respective locations too. They will write a short caption (journal) for it. Other users can tap on the map and view the images that these people have posted.
Integrating and supplementing existing crime-data with the Danger specific app
A digital currency that can be used for expanding and spicing up the garden
Sending important notifications about when a person should journal
Personal journal leaderboards
The Garden

Users can journal while building their personal digital world. For every journal entry, HowYa! draws links between core emotions and activities. For every such link, we plant an emotion-flower (a virtual flower specific to your particular emotion) in your virtual garden.

Feeling happy after winning Calhacks? Write about it and plant a permanent sunflower in your garden.
Feeling sad after your favourite team loses a football game? Write about it and plant a permanent orchid in your garden.
Feeling scared after watching The Conjuring with your friends? Write about it and plant a permanent Dandelion in your garden!