Since COVID-19 began, schools and workplaces were closed. With everyone stuck at home due to social isolation, the only place that they can meet is online. However, since we no longer have regular interaction and many of us have different schedules everyday, arranging a time to meet others can be hard, especially when we can’t discuss a meeting plan face to face.
Our solution simplifies this process by making it easy for users to upload their own schedules and compare them with others. After inputting their schedules and adding friends, users can see time slots where both they and their friends are free, and invite their friends to do an activity together during these time slots. If these 2 (or more) parties accept, the website will also remind them to join these meetings during the decided timeslot.
By making it more convenient and easy to meet up during this period of isolation, this project increases social interaction and (we hope) reduces social isolation.
We decided to choose this challenge as it was very relevant to us, being quarantined at home and unable to go outside and socialise with our friends. Many of us have been in this state of social isolation for months now.
We conducted research by looking at various NASA guidelines and findings from their behavioural experiments (https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/social-isolation), also learning about strategies developed to help astronauts cope with long term isolation and reduce the chances of being lonely(e.g. Mindfulness breaks and setting and sticking to a routine, finding something to keep track of).
The book “Psychology of Space Exploration” mentions that isolation can be a large stressor affecting an astronaut’s performance. This psychological stressor could pose high risks to safety, performance, or quality of life if it spirals out of control. Studies mentioned in the book have found that isolation and confinement was proven to be a key factor in individual or group coping in extreme environments.
We also interviewed our friends on their experiences staying at home and asked for feedback for what products they might want to better help them connect with people. We realised while people do have the urge to connect with others via online video conferencing, one major hindrance is the hassle of finding common free times that both parties are available to meet, causing them to be less likely to organise meetings with others and thus feel more isolated. We hope that our tool increases the convenience of organising online outings with your friend. Our tool can also be used as a social network, where one can find friends that are available to meet since they both share common free time in their schedules, thus reducing their loneliness.
We built a website powered by Flask in Python with an Sqlite database as the backend containing all the user and schedule data. For our front end, we used Bootstrap to style our website which was made in HTML and CSS. We came up with our idea rather late, which gave us very little time to implement such a system.
Here are screenshots of our project: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G-CpFirp1zuiDlCARqZaH24i8VEQznBQ0hJCeZSyOYg/edit?usp=sharing
https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/social-isolation
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/conquering-the-challenge-of-isolation-in-space-nasa-s-human-research-program-director/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1FYk1lkdh4
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4411.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200408-an-astronauts-guide-to-surviving-isolation
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/4/11/21212845/how-to-be-alone-coronavirus-quarantine-isolation-solitude