Space Guavas - Space Apps Challenge

Space Guavas| The Isolation Solution

The Isolation Solution

Social distancing policies enacted the world over during the COVID-19 pandemic have left many people socially isolated. Your challenge is to develop innovative solutions to combat social isolation.

Your life

Summary

Your Life is an app that creates a daily routine based on the user's needs. When completing the tasks set for the day the user gain points that can be traded for rewards.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We chose The Isolation Solution. With the COVID – 19 outbreak people from all around the world were obligated to stay inside their house and physically isolated themselves to follow WHO (World Health Organization) protocols on how to contain the virus.

Our take on ‘solutions to combat social isolation’ is the psychological aspect of it; staying inside has magnified problems that before were hiding in most people’s day to day life, for those who already were having problems with loneliness the pandemic only worsen their feeling of isolation. But with quarantine and the uncertainty of what is to come, mental health is the one of the major things we have to keep our eyes on and try to help as many people as possible.

The WHO gave tips on how to look after our mental health and helping others who need it. It showed that having a routine and following it is good for your mental state during times of isolation.

So our Project involves a prototype of an app that “gamifies” the user's daily routine. The app collects API data from the platforms the user uses to work, study, schedule meetings, and things related to their routines and creates a schedule for the day with the data collected. The data will also be used to see how much time the user spent on each of the platforms to make sure the user completed the task. With the completion of the tasks the user gets points that can be traded within the app for things our future partners will provide.

Studies show that gamification is effective in increasing engagement in online programs; so with our reward system, we expect that people would be more prone to follow a daily routine and make isolation more tolerable.

How We Developed This Project

INSPIRATION:

The first thing our team did was to survey to see how people were dealing with quarantine. The survey reached most of the states in our country and even other countries. And our age range was 15 to 70+.

One of the questions was “What would you ask astronauts about isolation and confinement?” and the most common answers were:

- How do you cope with being isolated?

- How not to feel anxious?

- How to keep focused?

- How to deal with the uncertainty of things?

- How to deal with being alone.

- What they do to pass time inside a small space?

- How to deal with being away from their loved ones.

And another question was “How's your mental health during these times of quarantine?” and 40% of the answers said that they were not okay, some even saying that it was really bad.

With that, we knew we had to find a way to try to answer some of the questions submitted and to help with the mental aspect of it, instead of going with the route of finding a safe way to meet.

APPROACH:

We wanted to come up with something that could reach as many people as possible, not mattering age, country, or social class. But we also wanted to make it something fun.

After many hours of brainstorming, and wanting to give up we came up with the idea of the app.

DATA USED:

Because our team is not formed with professionals that work with searching and using complex data, we had to take a simple route and find articles and photos that would help with supporting our project.

We had the most information from the Human Research Program and the Astronaut's input in living in space.

PROBLEMS:

Being transparent, our team doesn't have the skills to make an app or come up with a solution that has any type of coding behind it; so just having an idea, and not being able to execute it fully is quite frustrating.

Despite that, we worked extra hard to make our idea come to life as much as possible and having people around us interest in it was amazing. We are too hard-headed to give up.

FUTURE PLANS:

Our most important goal now is to make the app and launch it, being free and available everywhere; integrate it with all kinds of platforms and companies to make the user have the best plan in one space

We have big plans for the app’s future. We have an interest in making the reward system much more complex with partnerships from around the world.

Our goal is to make the points on the app a coin that you can use to buy virtual tours of famous places, like an amusement park and museums, access to new movies, live concerts, products, and many more thing we want to develop with our partners.

For the companies that choose to get involved is a profitable source also, because we expect that our app will make people use the platforms more, because of the rewarding system. And the virtual tours can be charged, so even if the location is closed it can still be able to profit something.

We believe that this pandemic showed that we are all connected more than we thought; allowing people access to things that they thought they would never see before is the way we want to go with the app.