Solala App

1 minute read

Building a data driven Mental Health Application that using Node.js on Azure

Current mental health apps fail in several manners:

Goal is to build a Mental health app design that increases retention and has meaningful results:

Target audience: users experiencing depression, anxiety, work/school stress
Designed using research on app retention
Can identify emotional state of user
Offers activities proven to reduce stress
Issue: varying needs of users Potential solution: use machine learning algorithms to identify emotion states
Combine results across procedures
Allows enhanced flexibility
Issue: no formal guidelines for combining certain procedures Goal: establish guidelines around ensemble procedures Potential impact in mental health research and real world impact on app users.

Solala is an app designed by students with the intention of improving the mental health of burned out professionals and students.

Built with universal design and accessibility principles in mind
UX Design process considers the needs of colorblind individuals
Additionally the design process considers user retention through gamification Users will care for a plant that grows with them
The plant is intended to motivate users to take care of themselves and complete growth tasks
Plant encourages users to drink water, meditate, and take breaks This work is backed by research into wellness and mental health for individuals under high stress.

Next steps: Conduct further research from consenting users including:

User retention for Solala based on reward intervals and task intervals
Testing other algorithms that process emotion state data.
Building this experiment in mobile native languages such as Darwin or Swift for better performance.