Inspiration
As students who come from various backgrounds, we've experienced firsthand trying to navigate mental health and wellness resources. From trying to explore counseling resources to finding a decent self-care app, there are not many good options out there, especially ones that integrate directly into a school's healthcare resources. We wanted to build something that makes navigating mental health on campus feel welcoming and readily accessible.
What it does
Our app is a comprehensive platform that consolidates both mental health/wellness resources with an accessible interface. We wanted to focus on ease-of-access, so we've created an simple daily task, 10 seconds of breathing exercises, that gets you motivated and feeling accomplished. It tracks the amount of steps you take per day whether through walking or running. The app also provides a friends feature, allowing you to connect with others and congratulate each others' wellness progress. Finally, we've connected the entire system to SMU's health portal, allowing students to find the help they need as fast as possible.
How we built it
We used React to build the frontend, utilizing Vite, TailwindCSS, and Mantine to help us develop our frontend faster. Our backend was written in Flask and connected to our MongoDB backend. We wrapped the backend in a Docker container and deployed it to an AWS ECS service using Terraform. This service is served behind an AWS ELB, which runs in its own VPC. All of this is proxied behind a Cloudflare CDN service, allowing the API to be accessed from anywhere.
Challenges we ran into
We originally started with a React Native application, but it proved too difficult to actually develop an application that felt like the original idea. There was also a lot of difficulties with the design process, as we had a pretty design-heavy application. Some members of the team also experienced minor Wi-Fi issues and connecting to services. Overall, we had a few roadblocks but were able to pivot and continue to the end.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are extremely proud of our final design and the research that went into it. We looked into many different applications and took what worked, creating sketches and mockups before actually writing any code.
What we learned
One big thing that we learned is that we will not be using React Native in the future. It's a good technology but too hard to prototype at a hackathon scale with. We did learn a lot about mental health resources and the different ways that organizations and individuals approach them. On the technical side, we learned how to integrate various tools and services into a user-friendly platform designed specifically for mental health and wellness.
What's next for Calm Companion
There's a lot of personalization features that have yet to be added. We are looking into using some data analytics and potentially machine learning to create better guided experiences for students. We're also looking into collaborating more closely with organizations who have healthcare services but may not have the adequate interface. Ultimately, we want to see this being used and integrated into other systems, not just at SMU.
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