Mindful Habits

Inspiration

As young adults, we are navigating through a lot of change. From adapting to post-secondary education, starting our careers, to living independently, there is a lot of stress coming our way. Young adults and youth also suffer from mental health issues at higher rates than other age groups, one in five Canadians suffer from mental illness by the age of 25 (https://mentalhealthcommission.ca/what-we-do/children-and-youth/). Something that has helped our team maintain our mental health has been the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a core skill in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a form of therapy that has been shown to help with depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorders, addictions, eating disorders, and PTSD. Through these practices, we have found relief and calmness, and we wanted to find a better way to create and a routine of these mindfulness activities. This is how we came up with Mindful Routine, an app that helps make mindfulness a habit and part of our self-care routine.

What it does

Mindful Routine is an app that groups mindfulness activities into lists called routines. The user will be able to add and edit different mindfulness activities that they find helpful along with some base activities adapted from https://dialecticalbehaviortherapy.com/. When the user starts their routine they will be guided along through their selected activities. Some of these activities include mindful breathing, which is accompanied by an in-app timer that can be set to the user’s desired time frame. There is also a reflection functionality where users can practice mental noting, which they can save for later viewing.

How we built it

React native to construct the front end
Expo to test the app
Google cloud Voice to Text*

Challenges we ran into

Initially setting up the project for each group member was surprisingly tedious and time-consuming (inits and installs)
Troubleshooting and bug fixing dependency issues, expo issues, GitHub merge problems
node_modules were a constant headache, with exports missing, versions mismatching, it seemed that something was always stopping me from properly working on the project
(We looked into Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, but couldn’t quite get it to work due to time restraints)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Has a number of different and distinct screens
Highly intuitive easy to use design
Created an app that helps users improve and maintain their mental wellbeing through mindfulness via creating and following daily routines that consist of a number of different tasks

What we learned

Building cross-platform apps are hard! React Native has a lot of functionality and quirks, which is challenging and rewarding during a hackathon. Since the team’s knowledge of React Native is varied, some of us learned React Native during this weekend, while others in our team got to deepen their knowledge.