Inspiration
A 2018 study by the American Psychological Association found that "news consumption has a downside". The downside is that negative news is a significant mood-changer as it tends to produce emotions of sadness, anxiety, and stress. And as news agencies continue to attempt to enthrall their audiences with increasingly negative news, this issue will only get worse. In fact, many experts agree that starting your day off with reading or listening to the news is one of the worst things you can do for your mental health. That is why we decided to create Zensor, a simple and easy-to-use Google Chrome extension that helps you to maintain your mental health by blocking negative news.
What it does
Zensor takes in Google News headlines and checks whether or not they have any conflict with the user's personal interests, deciding whether it will affect the user's mental wellbeing. If it will negatively affect the user's mental health, then Zensor will block the news headline allowing users to not have the stress of viewing upsetting or unsettling articles.
How we built it
We used an emotion analysis library called ParallelDots alongside JavaScript to create Zensor.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into issues with extracting the news headlines from the Google News webpage. Additionally, we had to deal with API limit issues and other API-related problems.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are all very proud of the project that we finished, Zensor. It incorporated the little previous knowledge we had of JavaScript and dealing with APIs on the web, with many new concepts we learned.
What we learned
We learned about working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and web APIs.
What's next for Zensor
- adding machine-learning algorithms to more accurately predict a user's reaction to a certain news headline to better decide what news to block, and what news not to block.
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