MealthHub

A mobile app to share personal stories and experiences, focusing on anonymity

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Inspiration

Mental health has been on the decline since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, as individuals are forced to isolate themselves at home. Current applications designed for mental wellbeing are individual-centric, meaning they focus on self-help and self-improvement strategies such as meditation, mindfulness, and individual sessions with professionals. While these strategies have been proven to be effective, if work-from-home remains the default for most people, physical isolation will continue to fuel feelings of loneliness. Hence, we found an area that we could focus on and decided to base our project on the mental health track. As our team has not found a platform for people to share their experiences and reach out to a community anonymously, we wish to connect people with others who are facing similar challenges in life through our project. Users can also connect with healthcare professionals to receive one-to-one assistance. We hope that our app can help users to get through these challenging times.

What it does

Introducing MealthHub (Mental HealthHub), a mobile app that allows users to discuss mental health issues anonymously. We hope to create a safe environment for users to record their struggles, successes, and life stories. Users can use features such as a diary to post stories and share them with other users anonymously. They can also keep track of their progress through their past entries. We also provide a platform for users to join groups and an option to reach out to healthcare professionals. In sum, the idea is for users all around the world to stay connected and be healthy.

How we built it

We built the user interface using Sketch. We wrote the mobile app on React Native. The user authentication was implemented using Firebase. We also attempted to use AssemblyAI for speech-to-text input for diary entries.

Challenges we ran into

Converting a wireframe into a functional mobile app in React Native as we had to learn many new technologies. The main difficulty was in sifting through the vast amount of documentation online in order to integrate these technologies into our app as needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of converting our ideas into a functional app. During this process, we also gained hands-on coding experience. Despite it being our first time trying out new technologies such as Sketch, Firebase, and AssemblyAI, we persevered and finally succeeded in at least implementing Firebase authentication after countless hours of debugging.

What we learned

JavaScript, UI/UX (design, color theme, template), problem-solving skills, time management, communication skills

What's next for MealthHub

We will work on these future extensions:

  • Speech-to-text conversion for individual diary entries using AssemblyAI
  • Twilio to notify users to share weekly experiences (mindfulness and gratitude) / Reminders for medications
  • Desktop App/Website
  • AR Psychologist Sessions using Echo3D
  • Data Analysis (Natural Language Processing) using Google Cloud to recommend user groups and promote past diary entries

Sketch references

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