During this period of social distancing, many people have felt isolated without their usual human interactions. This leads to feelings of isolation that can have many negative effects on someone’s mental health.
Covid Connector seeks to help people feeling isolated connect with one another. Through a chat service, people can connect to others to discuss the thoughts and challenges they face.
Covid Connector also provides mental health information. This includes warning signs of mental illness and how best to tackle it.
Positive news is important for maintaining a healthy outlook on the world. Our project provides a page displaying good news about Covid-19.
Finding a psychologist can be difficult. We provide resources to help connect people with professional help they need.
What inspired your team to choose this challenge?
We saw the Isolation Solution challenge and were immediately inspired with the idea for a chat service for isolated people. We see isolation as a serious problem presented by Covid-19. Providing a way for people to connect with others in a healthy environment is one way to combat this.
What was your approach to developing this project?
We chose to launch both a website and an app for Covid Connector. On our website, we provide information and data on both Covid-19 and mental health. Our app provides people with a chat forum, a good news page, a statistics page, and a Virtual reality demo. We modeled our app using Framer and made our website with Weebly. We use data from Tableau and NASA databases.
How did you use space agency data in your project?
We have compared space data on the mental health of astronauts to that of the mental health of people isolated by Covid-19. In the case of the astronauts, behavioral problems occurred due to limited human interaction and living in a new environment.
For the isolation problems here on Earth, we refer to astronaut data because they are similar to that of regular people during social isolation.
Based on this, we wanted to give isolated individuals on Earth access to normal levels of human interaction. We do this in three ways. Our website has a channel to direct people to a psychologist who can help them cope with isolation. We also provide a chat service to connect isolated people to each other for support. Finally, we implemented a VR system to simulate previous everyday life.
What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your project?
For creating our site, we used Weebly and Porkbun. Our app was modelled using Framer. We found data from NASA sources and Tableau. We communicated with each other using Rocket Chat and Zoom.
What problems and achievements did your team have?
Problems: Time zone differences gave us some scheduling difficulties. We originally planned on releasing a full functioning mobile app but decided to go with a prototype instead. Figuring out how to integrate Space Agency data into our project was difficult.
Achievements:
1) Our logo for CovidConnector is super awesome!
2) Successfully engaged astronaut data and link it with mental health and social isolation
3) Successfully developed a prototype for Covid Connector app
1) Warning Signs of Mental Illness - Information used in self-help section
https://www.mhanational.org/recognizing-warning-signs
2) Risk of Adverse Cognitive or Behavioral Conditions and Psychiatric Disorders - Study of isolation in astronauts
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20160004365.pdf
3) International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 9th edition. Source: Billica (2000) - Classification of Diseases by WHO / citation for graphic of astronaut data
4) COVID-19 Needs, Health & Wellbeing Survey Analysis
https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID-19NeedsHealthWellbeingInsights/SiSUHealthCOVID-19NeedsHealthWellbeingInsights?:embed=y&:embed_code_version=3&:loadOrderID=0&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link
5) COVID-19 Defining Health Disparities
https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID-19NeedsHealthWellbeingInsights/SiSUHealthCOVID-19NeedsHealthWellbeingInsights?:embed=y&:embed_code_version=3&:loadOrderID=0&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link
6) Global COVID19 Tracker - Graph of COVID cases
https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID-19Cases_15840488375320/COVID-19GlobalView?:embed=y&:embed_code_version=3&:loadOrderID=0&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link
7) The Spread of COVID-19 Cases Globally - Graph of cases by country
https://public.tableau.com/views/CovidAnalysis_15855822218030/COVID-19?:embed=y&:embed_code_version=3&:loadOrderID=0&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link
8) Confirmed Cases Death by Country - Graph of deaths by country
https://public.tableau.com/views/KFF-CoronavirusTracker-Update4-10-20/Overview?:embed=y&:embed_code_version=3&:loadOrderID=0&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link
9) Government Measures - Government procedures by country
https://public.tableau.com/views/Covid-19GovermentMeasuresWorldwide/CovidGovernmentMeasuresWorldwide?:embed=y&:embed_code_version=3&:loadOrderID=0&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link