The COVID-19 pandemic has socially isolated millions of people. Social distancing guidelines and orders to stay at home have separated connected populations. People lost daily interactions with friends and coworkers, which led to greater feelings of isolation and unhappiness. Even within households, many families are forced to social distance from each other, especially if an immunocompromised person is present. Safety is of utmost importance, so there needed to be a solution that maintained safety and allowed for people to reconnect with their friends and maintain a sense of mental wellbeing. Our product, Pondero, more than aptly addresses this challenge.
Pondero’s mission is “reflecting together, connecting together”. Our website features tools for self reflection, positivity, and connecting with friends. Users use Pondero to post about their feelings and experiences. This therapeutic activity serves as emotional and mental relief.
One of our product’s unique features is our sentiment analysis and mood tracker feature. Users can post about their thoughts, using our product as a reflective outlet. The sentiment analysis tool scans the user’s posts and creates a chart displaying the users’ happiness levels over each month; this is an effort to encourage mindfulness and decrease the negative feelings spurred by social isolation.
Further, our real-time pollution data monitor uses data from https://waqi.info/ and encourages users to engage in physical activity by indicating whether it is safe to go outside. Exercise releases endorphins and positive chemicals in the brain that enhance mood and general performance.
Another notable feature is our positivity toggle. Users have the option to see more positive posts through this toggle feature, improving their happiness levels and allowing them to maintain a sense of calm and serenity in these turbulent times, which also helps reduce negative feelings of isolation.
Not only is our website for users to more deeply interact with themselves, but it is also an opportunity to share positivity with others, without the usual burden of social media pressures to garner likes and follows.
Pondero changes the way people interact with social media - there’s now a way for people to maintain a sense of calm and positivity, working on their mental health while engaging positively with their friends.
Choose Pondero: communicate to rejuvenate!
What inspired your team to choose this challenge?
Mental Health and activism has drastically risen in terms of importance for our generation. In an era where technology is widely used to connect people all over the world, it is important to not lose the personal touch that comes from interacting with other people. As such, our team chose to tackle the Isolution Solution challenge. Our approach to developing this project was communication-oriented with having a unique and personal focus. Our first priority was creating a website that would immediately connect the user to others around the world. Once that was clarified, next we had to determine what we wanted our website’s true focus to be and in addition what the users’ purpose would be should they choose to interact. Reflective posts and diary entries not only allowed the user to view others' posts and share their own, but gave an opportunity for mindfulness and self-evaluation as well. Hence, the website was named, “Pondero”, which is latin for “to reflect” or “a reflector”. While our team’s goal was to connect people through our website, we wanted to provide the user with a chance to experience what comes from maintaining a personal relationship with others. Overall, our approach to the project was to ensure that while people are physically distancing themselves amongst the pandemic, we are to make sure that we don’t end up social distancing as well.
What was your approach to developing this project?
We developed this webapp from scratch, beginning with some working exclusively on the frontend while others did so on the backend. The frontend was first designed using Paint Tool SAI before it was implemented. In this manner, we were able to direct our focus each on specific parts of the webapp. Later, when the project assumed most of its shape, we connected the two parts together.
How did you use space agency data in your project?
We utilized NASA’s API to obtain the Astronomy Picture of the Day. There are various studies that show that viewing beautiful nature and space images are beneficial for mental health, and we thought that learning a couple space-related facts may probe the curiosity and excitement of the users.
What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your
project?
We wrote code in HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, and used Firebase for the backend. We made assets in Paint Tool SAI. We implemented sentiment analysis with IBM Watson.
What problems and achievements did your team have?
One problem that arose was that we were not able to easily find and access usable real-time air pollution data. In particular, we were not able to access various NASA Earthdata databases, despite significant effort. However, we were able to successfully utilize WAQI instead, and decided to incorporate NASA data through APOD. Some notable achievements of our team include the successful implementation of IBM Watson for sentiment analysis as well as Geolocation and WAQI for the pollution monitor.
To experience Pondoro yourself, visit https://covid19-spaceapps.web.app/