Smile2Smile

A mental health app for students at colleges. Facilitates students in distress to get help from fellow students who have also experienced similar challenges in the past. Links to Google Meet call.

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Inspiration

In the past week, I have personally been contacted by 4 separate friends who said they had been contemplating suicide. My girlfriend(me being Sean) has struggled with various mental health disorders over the years and contemplated suicide frequently. I identified an issue in which most people are most vulnerable to these thoughts late at night when they may not be as surrounded by people. That lack of people surrounding them may cause them to feel loneliest late at night. Colleges are in the unique position in which many people are like-minded, in a similar stage in life, in similar majors, and very close by. When the sun goes down and mental health professionals are no longer available, our application is there to connect students to help each other and form friendships with people who understand their struggle.

What it does

Using major, school, and year, it finds matches between people signing up who are distressed (help-seekers) and volunteers who are registered as currently stable. They specify their legal name, mental status, school, major, year in school. Assignment is based on the ranking system and the user's selection of ranked volunteers. As volunteers sign-in and create a Google Meet room, they get assigned someone who needs help. Smile2Smile sends the meeting link to the person, where they'll be able to vent or confide.

How we built it

Developed a JavaFX app and connected it to a MongoDB database. We have a ranking algorithm.

Challenges we ran into

Authenticating APIs with a desktop app. Setup with MongoDb. General IntelliJ issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having a final product that functions as expected.

What we learned

Some of the skills we learned include: how to do singletons, Hashmaps, and how to connect a database to the front-end.

What's next for MentalHealthApplication

Integrating a real conference API such as Zoom. Deploying to a real app-development platform such as ios. In the future we would like to better match users to helpers based on their interest. We would also like to implement a way to send notifications to volunteer helpers for the request to meet.

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