Inspiration
Due to COVID-19, everyone has needed to social distance and some people may have needed to self-isolate. From personal experience, this social distancing has caused me and everyone on my team to feel cramped up, trapped, and lonely. That is why for this year's RU Hacks we decided to target the issue of mental health and build a journaling application we believe can identify positive and negative trends in your life allowing you to embrace the good and prevent the bad.
“Journaling can be effective for many different reasons and help you reach a wide range of goals. It can help you > clear your head, make important connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and even buffer or reduce the effects of mental illness!”
What it does
Our application allows users to create journal entries and using Google's NLP service, we analyze their entries, location, and the time of the entry to understand how they feel. Overtime our application which leverages Machine Learning builds a profile on a person and allows the user to better understand where, when, and with whom he is the happiest. With this information, we hope that our users have everything they need to eliminate the repeating negative experiences from their life and embrace the positive experiences. Some of the steps that users can take based upon our application includes: changing their schedule, going to certain places which makes them happy, and choosing to work with individuals who make them the happiest.
How we built it
We built the smart journal using the following technologies, Flutter to build our cross-platform mobile (works for btoh iOS and android) app, Flask (Python backend framework) to build the python backend incorporating the Google Cloud Natural Language Processing API (NLP), and Docker, the Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine to host our backed on a highly scalable service. We use the sentiment and entity analysis tools from the Google Cloud NLP to analyze the tone of a text and the recurring emotions in it, which we combine with our custom algorithm to produce an user profile.
Challenges I ran into
Some of the challenges that I ran into include:
- Writing a custom algorithm which can interpret and analyze the NLP data, in dart
- Adding secret files in Kubernetes pods (for the NLP service)
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The accomplishments that I am proud of, include that we were able to implement and host a custom backend within a short span, design a cross-platform mobile app and incorporate the backend to produce an analysis which the user can use, and finally, build a complete app which is ready for use! Additionally, I am also proud that given the Covid-19 crisis and the billions of people which have been effected, we were able to complete an application which will have a tangible impact in making an impact in their lives by improving their mental health.
What we learned
During the course of this Hackathon, we improved upon our knowledge of building a full-stack application, connecting the different aspects together in an intricate manner - right from Flutter to python. Additionally, this was the first time some of us were using Kubernetes to host a backend.
What's next for Smart Journal
In the future, we hope to improve upon our analysis features by providing users more insight into the aspects of their life without having them complete a diary entry, and suggest actions that they can take.
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