- 24 Hour Hackathon Project -
One Day at a Time
An android app designed to help users track what they've consumed mentally and physically, so that they can identify triggers in their own lives to prevent relapses.
For a 24 hour hackathon hosted by Design Lab and Lumohacks, my partner, Owen Campbell and I, hacked together an Android app to help users with depression track their daily activities, including their diet, exercise, sleep and socialization. Users answer casually formatted questions, one by one, until they have a thorough overview of what they have consumed mentally and physically that day. This information is synthesized into a short journal- entry-style paragraph. After answering all the questions for that day, users can interact with the calendar to see entries from previous days, and can use this to determine potential triggers from patterns they recognize.
Inspiration
In a podcast by Giant Bomb, one of the hosts was discussing how he was dealing with his anxiety. He had decided to create a massive chart detailing everything he did. He quickly found a correlation between having an anxiety attack and his drinking habits. We wanted to harness this concept and distribute it in an accessible and digestible way to people suffering from depression, so that they can take their mental illness into their own hands, and identify triggers for their specific symptoms.
Problems to Solve
As many of us heard in the Youth Depression Challenge presentation, 50% of people with depression will relapse into another episode depending on how many episodes they have had in the past. This means that with every relapse, they are even more likely to have yet another relapse, which leads to more relapses in an endless and ever-increasingly vicious cycle. Identifying what, in each person’s life, is triggering symptoms of depression, and learning to avoid those triggers is one way to prevent relapses.
Persona
The research shown in the Youth Depression Challenge indicates that people with depression are typically in one or more of the following demographics:
- 15-25 years of age
- mixed race
- female
- unemployed &/ low income
Because these are the people who are most likely to have depression, we have taken these people into consideration as users for our app as well.
One of the biggest influences our Persona had on the development of our app was the choice to use Android as the platform as opposed to iOS. If our users are unemployed &/ poor, they are far less likely to have access to an iPhone than to a phone that runs android.
