Friendly

Say hello to a mentally healthy age of social interaction, where seniors and youth can easily connect!

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Inspiration

As four Canadian highschool students, with volunteer experience with seniors we found ourselves wanting to do something for their mental health, which is often neglected. We also knew that youth need volunteer hours, so we though the of best way to combine both. Introducing: Friendly, a platform that connects youth and seniors, with advantages for both! Seniors receive the benefit of not being socially isolated and improving their mental health, whereas youth can learn from the experiences of seniors, all while getting volunteer hours.

What it does

Friendly connnects isolated seniors and youth together through an online medium. It provides real time interactions between seniors and youth to ensure that seniors do not feel isolated. Through AI-powered chat, seniors can have a 24/7 Friend with them, a next level experience. Friendly's personalized profiles and user exploration systems allow youth to find seniors with similiar interests and connect with them. It encourages and prompts youth to connect with all sorts of senior individuals and it's booking system, further enhances the experience, allowing either side to book a meeting with each other.

The benefits? Both seniors and youth find more people to socialize with, and the direct correlation between seniors socializing and an increase in better mental health plays in. Senior's and youth's mental health improves! It's a no-brainer win-win! For seniors who may have memory-loss, socializing also plays an excellent role in their life, as it helps strengthen the brain! Overall? Friendly provides a lot of mental health benefits to seniors and youth for joining and socializing.

How we built it

The development of Friendly involved a thoughtful selection of modern technologies aimed at delivering a seamless and enjoyable user experience for both seniors and youth.

Frontend: For the frontend, we leveraged a combination of HTML5, JavaScript, and TailwindCSS framework

Backend: Our backend infrastructure is built on Next.js's server framework. Next.js provides us with server-side rendering capabilities, enhancing the platform's performance and search engine optimization.

Database: To store and manage user data, we employed MongoDB as our database solution.

Artificial Intelligence: We used GPT-3.5 to integrate Artificial Intelligence into our project. Overall, we used a lot of well-known technologies that we were well versed in, but also took a bit of risk and used well-known technologies that we used for the first time.

Challenges we ran into

During the development of Friendly, we encountered several challenges that pushed us to think creatively and work collaboratively. Some of the challenges we faced included ensuring our UX was both youth and senior friendly. We also had to take on the challenge of building our first server with Next.js and MongoDB (Atlas) and not Node.js, Express and SQL. Using MongoDB with Mongoose for the first time proved to be a challenge, as none of us had fully utilized it. In the end, this played to our advantage and taught us alot of document-based-databases.

During our time developing Friendly we also challenged ourselves to think about how we could effectively address seniors' mental health, and in the end, we concluded that a platform to help them connect to the next generation, would help continue their legacy and improve their mental health!

What we learned

This was our first time using server-side Next.js instead of Node.js and it allowed to learn how to build a server with it. We got to experiment with Mongoose and MongoDB, as well as MongoDB Atlas which taught us a lot about the differences between traditional SQL and modern document-databases,

What's next for Friendly

The next step for Friendly are to add more features and make it desktop-friendly. Some features we plan on on adding include increasing security for login and signups, as well as user data.

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