Being social creatures at our core, humans are generally unprepared to deal with isolation. Unfortunately, being quarantined during a pandemic can lead to both emotional distress from isolation as well as build up of stress and anxiety due to COVID-19 related issues. In order to tackle these issues, our project connects users who want to socialize by pairing them with others who are in similar environments or are pursuing similar pastimes. In addition, we combat stress and anxiety by recommending resources related to their current state which we determine through a short daily quiz. To give users more awareness of their mental state, we provide statistics that show how their responses to the quiz in the past as well as by making it easy to see trends in their own behavior and mood changes as well as common trends in their conversations with others.
Inspired by the research done regarding ‘Behavioral Issues Associated with Long Duration Space Expeditions’ and the final recommendations reached through it, our group decided to create an app that helps with social isolation during quarantine. We began our project by looking at research to see what conclusions the scientific community had reached about the effects of isolation. We found that isolated individuals were at a higher risk for stress and anxiety, and the risks are only exacerbated by the period of uncertainty we are currently in. This guided us towards a solution in the area of mental health and wellbeing, and we wanted to make it specific to the current situation.
To accomplish this, we created an app with a dual pronged approach: a daily quiz to give people the tools to identify when they should seek help, and a chat tool to foster connection with the outside world and promote feelings of wellbeing and connection to humanity. We also quickly realized providing immediate feedback in terms of history and statistics would benefit people.
Due to time limitations, we had to restrict ourselves to proofs of concept for the three main portions of the app (check them out!) : a dummy user interface, the basis of our data analysis, and a quiz based on multiple studies looking at COVID-19 and quarantine related stressors. These were brought to life using software such as figma,Tableau, G Suite. During our process we also tested Amazon Web Services and Meteomatics, as well as started developing sentiment analysis using R, but decided against using them.
A major challenge we had during this hackathon was finding and utilising data. Our biggest issue stemmed from accessing data as it involved a rather elaborate process as well as finding numbers we could study and link together. Since most of the data we were looking for were in incompatible file formats, we decided to think out of the box by looking for data that we could analyse to come up with conclusive trends. For example, looking at trends in aerosol gave us an idea of the amount of pollution in the area and hence the urbanisation in the area.
Another challenge had to deal with accommodating the needs of many different people. We included teletype numbers for deaf users to access hotline resources, kept descriptive text with as many icons as possible to allow translation software to work with our app, and tried to avoid cultural references that could be confusing to international users. We also balanced keeping the app relevant to the current COVID-19 pandemic whilst trying to avoid exposure fatigue from calling attention to negative events. We did this by including both positive and negative responses in the quiz, as well as not referencing the pandemic unless it was absolutely relevant.
COVID-19 Community Mobility Report By Google. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
NASA’s global VIIRS Data regarding nightly nighttime lights