PsyKick | Devpost

Inspiration

This past year alone, we've experienced 2 fellow students committing suicide on campus. With 1 in 5 people in Canada experiencing a mental health problem or illness in any given year (Canadian Mental Health Association, 2013) the current 2-6 week wait between therapist appointments is clearly not sufficient for our student community. Many of our friends surface that it's difficult to bring up or even remember triggers or mental health events that they experienced between appointments, to drive value from the limited time they get with their counselor. Not only this, but peers have expressed their feelings of isolation as some days they can't even get out of bed to attend classes. Drafting an email to explain their situation to their professors or to ask for necessary help and support is a task too daunting to many students dealing with the lack of motivation that comes with depression. This often results in additional stress, students not seeking the necessary support from their professors, consequently falling behind in class, which further threatens their mental wellbeing. Well, PsyKick envisions to walk with those students during these difficulties by providing a method of recording, predicting and tracking behavioural patterns, as well as streamlining the communication between the affected student and their respective professors.

What it does

The counselor and the student set up a profile on PsyKick that ask them customized daily questions to gain an insight on their moods, mental state, and health. This data is then processed in the app and through machine learning, recognizes patterns that can predict a decline in their mental health that may cause them to start missing classes, fall behind in school, etc. This data is displayed in a dashboard for both the student and the counselor to observe and gain a better understanding of the affected student. The app will alert the users, whether it is to ask if they need support from their buddy system, professional counselors or the professors, derived from the trends in the moods. The data collected can be a method of proof when requesting for accommodations with the professors on days students cannot get out of bed. This product streamlines this rather painful process for students through email drafts, templates, easy click and select options, ultimately maintaining healthy relationships between professors and students.

How we built it

The team put great in solving a problem, rather than just plainly creating a cool solution. Together, we brainstormed ideas on what we feel passionate about - mental illness - and voted on a feasible and useful solution that we would tackle. Making use of the teammates' expertise in mobile app building, backend, UX / front-end coding, we delegated tasks.