PenDown

Spreading positive viewpoints not positive test results

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Inspiration

Several members of our team suggested journaling because of its benefits for mental health. In fact, one of them has been writing journals for 5 years straight! However, it can be a downward spiral of negativity if our journals are filled with cognitive distortions - irrationally negative thought patterns that affect our mood. Wouldn't it be nice if someone kept us away from those distortions?

According To the Health Enclyopedia,One of the ways to deal with any overwhelming emotion is to find a healthy way to express yourself. This makes a journal a helpful tool in managing your mental health. Journaling can help you: -Manage anxiety -Reduce stress -Cope with depression Journaling helps control your symptoms and improve your mood by: -Helping you prioritize problems, fears, and concerns

When you have a problem and you're stressed, keeping a journal can help you identify what’s causing that stress or anxiety. Once you’ve identified your stressors, you can work on a plan to resolve the problems and reduce your stress.

What it does

PenDown helps writing journals become a more informative experience by detecting and tracking our mood. Once a journal entry is submitted, our server analyzes its dominant mood and return the "mood score" to our user. We suggest this score to our users so they become more aware of their mental well-being and reach out to others' support in time.

How we built it

Our application is built with React for the frontend and Firebase and Google Cloud API for the backend. We use Google Cloud Natural Language API to analyze the journals and Google Data Loss Prevention API to redact the journals before posting them to community dashboard.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge is certainly the time constraint. Our design and frontend team worked tirelessly over the last 48 hours to complete as many features as possible. We couldn't finish our optional features (described below in the future of PenDown). Meanwhile, our backend team had to fix a lot bugs relating to Firebase and connection to the frontend. Since it was the first time they implemented Google Cloud Platform, getting it up and running was also time-consuming. Moreover, we encountered some CORS-related bugs near the end of hackathon, which prevented us from delivering the core functionality of the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Completed a mobile-friendly user interface
  • Implemented Google Cloud Services (Firebase, Google Cloud Natural Language API, Google Data Loss Prevention API) to perform most features successfully in development environment (Testing the API: https://youtu.be/1pGEwzgBejM)

What we learned

We got a chance to try out some cool technologies like Firebase and Google Cloud API as well as several Javascript libraries such as react-chartjs-2 and Draft.js. Most importantly, deployment comes with the most annoying bugs!

What's next for PenDown

A fully functioning user interface that empowers our community to give others positive feedback. Users are asked for permission to post their redacted journals to our community dashboard. Other users can help them become aware of their cognitive distortions by pointing out a specific one that the owner of the journal may be suffering at that time. Automatically suggested encouragement can also be added to the feedback. Moreover, an informational section for activities that promote mental well-being (e.g. meditation or physical exercise) can be added to our app.

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