Inspiration
Recent studies have reported a rise in anxiety due to the current covid pandemic. To address part of the issue, we wanted to create an application to help our users to sort through any positive or negative thoughts they are experiencing. Upon brainstorming, we found out that journaling is a great as well as a highly recommended tool for coping with anxiety. As the fear of uncertainty is a leading contributor to anxiety, our app will help facilitate our user’s thoughts and help set goals to overcome uncertainties they may face. The application uses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as the primary technique to allow effective journaling. CBT highlights how negative thoughts can lead to negative feelings and actions. But, if you reframe your thoughts in a more positive way, it can lead to more positive feelings and helpful behaviors.
What it does
MyCBTJournal, at its current state, allows users to easily record their mood and write a journal entry. Currently, there are 5 available mood options which provides a quick way to record the user's mood at the moment, and an option to fill in a mood journal entry. Additionally, there is also an option to complete a personalized CBT worksheet that guides users through a set of constructive questions to ease ones negative thoughts. The questions are asked in a manner to easily allow users to reflect on their negative thoughts, and gain a different perspective about them.
How we built it
We used Flask for the backend and to make the application routes, MongoDB as the database to store mood data as well as journal entries, and lastly HTML, CSS, Javascript and Bootstrap to build the UI of the web application.
Challenges we ran into
As this project involves unfamiliar topics related to psychology, team members had to do thorough background research to learn about and understand the practices of cognitive behavioral therapy techniques before brainstorming for the structure and building blocks for the application. Additionally, we were all unfamiliar with Flask, the jinja syntax to link source files to an HTML document and MongoDB as a database. We spent a lot of time watching tutorials as well as building mini projects to familiarize ourselves with these tools in order to be able to build out this application during the hackathon! Another challenge we faced was trying to build this application and split tasks whilst working virtually - especially since we grouped up with students from other universities as well as in other time zones!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This project has been an enjoyable learning experience. We were able to gain knowledge in novel fields and were able to ideate a project idea that could potentially make somebody's life happier and better. We are also very proud that we learned new frameworks such as Flask and explored new/interesting libraries, and were able to apply the new knowledge to our project.
What we learned
In general, we learned about how to use Flask to create simple web applications. Additionally, we also learnt how to store data about an application using MongoDB.
What's next for MyCBTJournal
The next steps for MyCBTJournal would be to implement the CBT worksheet in a more personalized manner that asks subsequent questions based on the users emotions as they fill out the worksheet. Additionally, we also want to develop an insights page that gives the user a better idea about their data - which in this case are their mood entries and journal entries. Maybe have a chart or visualization that shows them their mood distribution over a time period, streaks on how often they have been journaling their thoughts and last but not least a breakdown of their top emotions.
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