NotAlone

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  Web App Homepage

Inspiration

All four members in our group have faced depression or anxiety at some point, and found that the opportunity to communicate with people who relate is a cathartic process. However, sometimes it is hard to meet these people in person due to location and also willingness of people to seek out

What it does

NotAlone allows people facing mental health issues to find online support groups consisting of people facing similar struggles. As people log in under a pseudonym, NotAlone offers anonymity, allowing for consolation especially when people may find it hard to share their feelings with people close to them. NotAlone also uses natural language processing to help promote sending positive messages to other people.

How we built it

We used Flask and Bootstrap to build the front end of the website and Firebase to store user information and messages. The back end and natural language processing was implemented in python and hosted on a flask server.

Challenges we ran into

Google Cloud documentation was not super clear, so it took a lot of patience and time to find out how to authenticate the code to be able to use natural language processing. In addition, without much database experience among the team, being able to use and implement firebase was an immense challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to use natural language processing via Google Cloud, and using Firebase

What we learned

What's next for Not Alone

Gamification: a point system that rewards users for sending positive messages that convey empathy and support towards other individuals in the support group while deducting points for negative or inappropriate messages. We can allow ads to run on the site, and use ad funding to allow users to earn discounts on a wide range of products based on their points

Built With

• bootstrap
• flask
• google-cloud
• html
• javascript
• natural-language-processing
• python