Blue | Devpost

Inspiration

Mental illnesses affect our lives through our personal experiences and through loved ones and friends. According to CMHA, 1 in 5 Canadians will have personal experience dealing with a mental health problem. What lead us to create this app was how a motivational note placed on a friend's mirror every morning gave them hope and reason to get up every morning.

What it does

Blue is a virtual journal that records happy memories entered and stores them so the user can look back on it when they need inspiration. When a negative entry is detected, it will give the user closure by crumpling up the page to indicate that they should keep it out of mind and that it's over. After the negative message is crumpled up, the user can either reminisce on a memory that made them happy or think about an experience that made their day better, to focus more on the positive.

How we built it

The iOS app was created with XCode and Swift and we implemented the IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding API to analyze if the journal entry was about a positive or negative experience which then prompted the user to choose one of the available options, recall a happy past memory or write another memory.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we ran in to were coding with Swift and using Xcode since this was all of our first times creating an ios app. We also had to resort to pair programming since half of our team had Windows computers and were not able to run our swift code so we decided to do pair-programming.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super proud that the app we were able to successfully implement the API and we were able to develop an ios app despite the time constraints and our inexperience with ios development.

What we learned

We learned the skills of ios development, using SDKs and API's to enhance our programs.

What's next for Blue

Next for Blue, we want to be able to increase its accessibility by including an option to record an entry by voice recording since IBM Watson does have APIs where they can analyze emotion from speech. We also want to be able to improve Blue's UX/UI.