• Andrea Fung
• Drue Nooyen
• Jianding Bai
• Stephanie Xue

Journaling has always been a powerful tool for self-expression, reflection, and personal growth. It allows us to process our thoughts, navigate challenges, and track our journey over time. Inspired by this timeless practice, we wanted to create something that not only preserves these experiences but also enhances them with meaningful, intelligent feedback. Our goal was to transform journaling into an interactive, insightful, and uplifting experience. Through Mentra, we hope to empower individuals to better understand themselves, gain clarity, and improve their well-being.

Our application revolutionizes the traditional journaling experience by integrating intelligent insights and advice tailored to the user's needs. It allows users to log their thoughts, emotions, and experiences while receiving thoughtful, insightful, and actionable responses that support self-reflection and encourage personal growth and well-being.

Users can:

• Login or register for a new account
• Select their desired category of journal responses:
  • Supportive: Provides compassionate guidance and encouragement
  • Insightful: Gives advice and perspectives to get you thinking
  • Actionable: Provides clear goals to help you stay focused and move forward.
• Then users can then type in their journal entry and the application will generate a personalized response based on the category of response selected using Google's Gemini generative AI API
• Users can also view the history of past journal entries and responses for a particular category (organized by date and time in reverse chronological order)

• Welcomes the user and allows them to login to their account

• Allows new users to register for a new account

• Allows the users to select their desired category of journal responses and type in their journal entry

• Displays a personalized response based on the category of response selected and the user's journal entry
• Response is generated by Google's Gemini generative AI API

• Allows the user to select the category of previous journal entries and responses to view

• User can view the history of past journal entries and responses for a particular category
• Journal entries are organized by date and time in reverse chronological order

• Front-end: The frontend was built with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to provide a smooth and responsive user experience.
• Back-end & database: We developed this application using Django and Python3 for the backend, leveraging SQLite as our database to store journal entries, categories of entries, and user data.
• API: We integrated Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash generative AI API
• Deployment: We deployed the application on Render, ensuring seamless accessibility for users.

Some challenges we ran into include figuring out how to link separate accounts for different users. We also encountered issues with integrating the Gemini 2.0 Flash API into our system. Additionally, it was also challenging trying to figure out how to implement the API key into an environment variable for security and safety. We also faced the challenge of deploying our application on Render using our defined environment variables.

One of our biggest achievements was successfully integrating the Gemini 2.0 Flash API into our application. For many of us, this was our first experience working with an AI-powered API, and it was rewarding to see how it could enhance the user experience. This project also reinforced our ability to work collaboratively, problem-solve, and bring an idea to life.

We gained valuable insights into both technical development and teamwork. We deepened our understanding of backend development with Django, Python3 and SQLite while also improving our frontend skills with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Integrating the Gemini 2.0 Flash API was a new challenge, and through trial and error, we learned how to effectively handle API authentication and ensure successful communication between our application and the AI model.

For Mentra, we want to expand and add more features and functions that can help users improve their wellbeing. This can include chat-lines, additional categories, levels of response depth, goals tracking and/or progress summary. It would be great to add more accessibility features such as text to speech and speech to text in the future as well. Full Mentra ahead!

• Install the latest version of python
  • Check the version using the command
    • python --version
• Clone the repository from github by typing in the command line
  • HTTPS: git clone https://github.com/steph-xue/mentra.git
  • SSH: git clone git@github.com:steph-xue/mentra.git
• Install any dependencies by using the command
  • pip install -r requirements.txt
• Apply database migrations by typing in the command line
  • python manage.py makemigrations
  • python manage.py migrate
• The web application can be run on your local server by typing the command
  • python3 manage.py runserver