MindFlix

Sharing Tab Mindflix

Inspiration

We saw a lot of our peers getting into the habit of doom scrolling social media apps like Instagram, Tiktok,Snapchat,Youtube shorts even Linkedin (especially in this bad job market) to an extent that it seemed like an addiction.We strongly believe that the habit of scrolling has become a pressing mental health issue and would grow worse in the years to come so we though of hacking a solution to tackle it would be a great idea for the decade to come.So we thought let's take down this attention economy by its own tactics.Gamify it and make people compete against their friends to slowly and to some extent get rid of this habit.

What it does

Mindflix gamifies scrolling addiction to incentivise time spent away from infinite scroll apps and compete against friends on weekly competitions just like the apple fitness app competitions. According to "Exploring Social Accountability for Pervasive Fitness Apps" by Yu Chen et al., a thorough user study was conducted, revealing that social settings, competitive ones included, significantly boost ongoing participation in physical activities beyond the baseline levels. This concept could similarly be leveraged to address the issue of doom scrolling, by employing motivational strategies inspired by the study to encourage users to engage in more positive online behaviors.

How we built it

We built an app using React Native so it runs on all mobile platforms that gets the time spent scrolling data as we whitelisted the apps that we currently know of having this behaviour.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble deciding on how to calculate the time not spent on apps with infinite scroll as a percentage to present in the 4th ring of the fitness app however finally we decided on as a percentage of screen time to be the metric to decide the progress of the 4th ring of the fitness app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how we could integrate and fit our solution into an existing system to expand the connotation of health not limiting just to physical fitness but mental fitness as well instead of having a major change that would have to make through the cycle of acceptance by whoever we present it to.

What we learned

Apart from building apps that run both on IOS and android as well as the web using React native and a lot of debugging we learnt a lot about human motivations and how to shape them to get a desired outcome even if it is against the tendency to do whats convenient.

What's next for MindFlix

We plan on developing Mindflix to make an app for the Apple watch so that we keep getting notification on the watch about the users friends position in the competition something similar to how the fitness app does it.