Introducing HarmoniHealth, a place to find companionship in a world riddled with isolation– where those in need find no solace unless they are ‘prescribed’ it. HarmoniHealth offers a safe, secure space where all individuals can share their stories and emotions freely– learning from one another and finding comfort in knowing they’re not alone. This inclusive community provides warmth, empathy, and companionship to everyone– allowing them to take care of themselves and their mental health with the help of others.

Our inspiration for this project stems from our own experiences as well as current news events regarding the rise of depression and mental health issues amongst young adults. In our research, we found that almost 21.3% of all adults in the US have mental health issues with young adults taking the lead. However, when it comes to treatment, we found that over 21% had trouble accessing primary health care with double that amount not being able to get the mental health or substance treatment they needed. This spurred us to develop a project focused on safe treatment through companionship-- in a conservative manner.

The app focuses on building relationships with individuals that have similar interests and backgrounds by pairing them up based on answers they have inputted through a form. On the form, the users can indicate their preferences when it comes to what they are looking for in a companion and as well as why they wanted to join this community. For safety purposes, we plan on having each user connect with a professional first to prevent any violence or inappropriate behavior between users. After that, the user can choose to be matched with a professional (if that is what they would prefer) or a companion based on how they feel. One of our main focuses in confidentiality with all conversations being completely private-- after 72 hours, all conversations will be deleted to account for privacy issues. If the user feels like they would prefer a different companion, they can choose to get rematched. The goal is to connect with individuals of similar experiences-- to build a support system they may not have and to remind them that they are not alone.

We built the app using a Springboot framework with Maven. The backend was done in Java as well as the integration of Langchain-openai for a simple chatbot integration (using Postmans to assist with deployment). For the frontend, we utilized Figma in terms of UX design as well as code creation through Figma's development mode. We edited the React code ourselves with individual edits to the Typescript and CSS files done as well. We used REST API endpoints to connect the frontend to the backend.

We faced many challenges regarding the development of the idea in the first place-- we spoke to many mentors asking for advice and critique regarding our project as we are tackling a topic that is difficult and complex. We wanted to see this companionship in a positive light, but only do so would be naive-- thus we aimed to increase safety measures to insure that every user receives what they came for, in a calm and respectful manner. We also ran into many technical issues as our attempts to utilize Figma Dev Code were not as successful as we hoped-- ending with us having to code the majority of the frontend ourselves and adding all the endpoints too. There were also issues with the integration of langchain as while it was successful in the port initializing process, the actual link to the port was missing, making it incapable of loading to Postmans.

We are really proud of our logo (complete credit goes to Melissa and all her hard work!) as it symbolizes the purpose of this app. We wanted to create a safe space for those who just need someone to talk to-- someone who can understand what they are going through and help them through advice, or just being there for them. We all need someone in our corner, especially when dealing with mental stress-- nobody deserves to feel isolated. We are also really proud of frontend work we were able to accomplish as well as the successful connection to the backend.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/depression-rates-us-adults-reach-new-high-gallup/story?id=99387994 https://mhanational.org/online-depression-screening-data-and-statistics