Flor addresses two aspects of social isolation: first is negative effects to mental health due to lack of interaction, and second is a disconnect with events happening in the outside world. Flor aims to provide meaningful social connections to the user through conversations with others of similar interests. At the same time as flower colors represent risk status, the garden flowers the user collects serve as a meaningful visualization of how people in the world have been affected by the crisis.
We were inspired with this idea for our project after brainstorming solutions to feelings of loneliness and isolation. Some people are fortunate enough to have a circle of friends that they regularly interact with, however many of us, in our current situation, don't have the opportunity to expand our social network in a rewarding way. This led our team to creating an app specifically designed for the purpose of interacting with new people, and having meaningful social experiences.
We decided to execute our idea through the form of a mobile app to maximize convenience to the user. The friend recommendation system is based off of the results of a personality test, and uses a nearest neighbour search to find people most similar to the user.
For this project, we used NASA population density data, as well as data of COVID cases throughout the US, such that people in regions with a higher case number and population density are preferentially selected in the search.
One challenge that we faced during this project is a now unused idea that involved using earth observation data to count the number of cars in a given region using AI both before and after the COVID pandemic, and using the difference in car traffic as a measure of how hard hit that region was. The thinking behind this approach was that since this app would be geared towards isolation, and not directly COVID cases, a reduction of transportation would be a slightly better metric of how isolated residents in that area are feeling. However, considering the time we had left, and the complexity of creating a working prototype of the idea, we decided to move on to a simpler approach, with the possibility that such a feature may be implemented in the future. In addition, during the course of this project, two members of our team unexpectedly had to leave from the competition, which severely impacted our plan of workflow.
One big leap in both progress and enthusiasm we felt as a team was when we first got to see what the app's user experience would look like. Being able to scroll through your garden, view your recommended flowers, and finalize the aesthetic of the app was very exciting.