Canto - Redefining Wellness

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Inspiration

What inspired us to do this project was the ability to apply our knowledge and try to help those going through stressful times or times with mental health problems. Many people need a way to help express how they are feeling because they do not exactly know what they are going through and they need something to help soothe them and help themselves get in tune with their feelings through a channel. For many young adults, music is a way for them to express themselves and explore their feelings. We were drawn to wanting to help this mental health crisis that the nation is going through by trying to help people understand what they are feeling through stressful times.

What it does

This is a mental health music therapy app that uses AI and text-based analysis to generate a playlist that helps soothe the mind and body of a person in distress.

How we built it

We built our app using a combination of a couple languages, mainly focusing in on Dart and Java. We used Android-Studio as our platform to run our code and created a UI on Flutter using Dart so that we could have a mobile app as well as a website that runs our project.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several obstacles while trying to start our app. One of the first challenges that we ran into was that we were trying to use a couple of libraries to help write our AI and text-based analysis code, however, we wanted to write our app in Kotlin or Dart so that we could have an Android app. This was a problem we had to maneuver around by trying to completely generate the text analysis by ourselves. Another challenge we ran into was that we first tried creating our app in Kotlin, however, we soon ran into many problems rooted around the same main error where resources were not being found, so we had to scrap the idea and move to Dart instead. When integrating the openai API, we took several hours trying to converse with our AI on our app, and after much debugging, we figured it out. One of the last challenges we faced was that the AI responses to the user's texts were not formatted correctly, so we had to partially redo our entire app, to make the integration of our AI fully functional.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to create an app that effectively helps users decompress from their problems. We are proud of our integration of Openai's API key into our app to help use an AI in conversation with the user to help us understand more about them. The UI that we created using a multitude of different languages and platforms took us a long time, which helped us create an end-product app that we were satisfied with. The text-based analysis took a long time as well and we are delighted with how it works.

What we learned

We learned about several different languages over these 36 hours such as Dart, Kotlin, Swift, and a couple more. We also learned how to work on Android-Studio and how to create an app UI from scratch. One more thing that we learned was how to integrate an API into our application, which helped us with the AI aspect of our project.

What's next for Canto - Redefining Wellness

Next for Canto, we want to publish our app onto the Google Play Store for android users to be able to use, and later on, we want to be able to also be able to create a version for IOS. We also want to increase the effectiveness of our AI and add speech-based analysis so users can simply talk to us about their day as if they are conversing face-to-face with another person.