According to the World Health Organization (WHO), last year 14% of India's population suffered from mental health ailments, including 45.7 million suffering from depressive disorders and 49 million from anxiety disorders. Especially in this Covid pandemic, when most of the countries went into lockdown, it is very easy for people to feel alienated, unmotivated, and stressed which when coupled with anxiety, overthinking and irritation have led few to self-harm with some even losing their lives to mental health.
Mental health is an aspect of everyone's life, although, for some, it's more of a struggle than for others, especially at college where students are facing new and stressful stimuli every day. With a large population now working from home and staying away from loved ones, the mental health situation has deteriorated. As such, it becomes important to track and remedy any problems before they get too serious. We try to achieve this using the Companion App.
In this competitive, fast-paced, age of computers, it's very easy for people to fall prey to stress, anxiety, anger, depression, low self-esteem to name a few. The Companion app would be effective in providing guidance in lifestyle and motivation to get relief from mental health issues and also make therapy more accessible, efficient, and portable. It would give people the chance to accurately assess and track their own mental health. It would eventually help users achieve a state of balance in life and help them uplift their mood by monitoring and managing their holistic wellness over time.
- Planning requirements for the mental health tracker app, making the user flow, and writing the user stories.
- Creating low-fidelity wireframes for visualizing the app structure.
- Designing a proper high-fidelity user interface of the application on Figma by taking inspiration from Dribbble and Behance.
- Initializing Firebase for the project and forming the backend architecture with the help of Firebase database and authentication API.
- Performing sentiment and emotional analysis either with the help of TensorFlow or Expert-ai APIs on the text entered in the user’s journal.
- Starting to develop the frontend of the app in Flutter with the help of various libraries and packages as per the UI mockup.
- After completing the frontend, testing the app for bugs. Also, running it on virtual or physical devices of different screen sizes, hence verifying the app’s responsiveness.
- Using GitHub to save my work in a single repository, enabling remote collaboration and regular updates.
- After the final testing, releasing the app in production mode and shipping the final build ready to be run on Android devices.
I have implemented the project by using Flutter, Firebase majorly. Various APIs like YouTube, quotes and GitHub played an integral role in the completion of the project.
- YouTube API - It was used to fetch motivational videos for the user.
- Quotes API – It was used to fetch quotes which are displayed randomly based on each time the user opens the application.
- Firebase – Firebase is used for authentication of users and for storing user data.
- GitHub – We used GitHub for storing raw JSON of specialist data which we scraped from an open database website.
- Create memes for fun
- Mini arcade games to relax the mind
- Sleep stories to calm the user down
- Reminders to eat regularly/drink water
- Emotional (sentiment) analysis for tailored recommendations
- Notifications to take feedback on improvement after completing some activity
- Connect the app to a smartwatch to track sleep, fetch step count and even monitor heart & respiratory rate with the help of the phone camera sensor
- An accountability buddy system where each user is paired with a buddy so that they can follow along on each other’s journey, providing support & motivation
- Make the app available in regional languages
- Integrate journals, blogs, and exercises
This project is licensed under the MIT License.