India accounts for 36.6 percent of the total suicides in the world. Every single day, an average of 381 people commit suicide and more than 83% of people are agonizing from mental health issues. Still, most people in our country find it uncomfortable to talk to medical professionals because of poverty or fear from society. The persisting stereotypes in the country have made people believe that mental illness is in fact, not an illness. There have been many advancements in science and technology in recent years which have made it possible to cure almost any ailment. Yet when we talk about one’s mental health, our country falls behind.
Not only are people reluctant to seek any help, but it is the dearth of psychologists and psychotherapists available in the country, to the right people, at the right time which makes it difficult to combat the deteriorating mental health of the people, especially youth. The situation has become gruesome through the entire pandemic and continues to worsen. So to obviate this issue we decided to design ‘psy-care’.
Tools and Technologies used:
- HTML: The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser.
- CSS: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML.
- JavaScript: JavaScript is a scripting/programming language that allows you to implement complex features on web pages. Every time a web page does something that isn’t static like displaying timely content updates, interactive maps, animated 2D/3D graphics, scrolling video jukeboxes, etc. you can bet that JavaScript is probably involved. Though we are not going to implement JavaScript directly. To implement JavaScript we will be using React.js, a JavaScript library as it is more ideal when we have to create a system.
- React.js: React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It helps us to build encapsulated components that manage their own state, then composes them to make complex UIs. Since component logic is written in JavaScript you can easily pass rich data through your app and keep the state out of the DOM. Also, React can power web apps through React Native.
- React Native: React Native helps us to create native apps. There are two main reasons for using React Native for our web app:
- React Native provides us cross-platform applications i.e., for both Android and IOS.
- Our website will be created using React, so moulding it into apps through React Native will save us a lot of time.
- Node.js: Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, back-end JavaScript runtime environment that runs on the V8 engine and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser. Node.js helps us to do server-side scripting with the help of JavaScript which makes it easy to create a web app as you don’t have to learn any other scripting language. Just like React we will be using a library, Express.js for creating our server as it makes our task easy.
- Express.js: Express is a back end web application framework for Node.js, designed for building web applications and APIs.
- MySQL: MySQL is a Relational Database Management System that uses SQL to organize the data in tabular forms, known as entities, and also helps to create a relationship between those entities.
Architecture of the web-app: The application we are going to create will be on MVC model i.e. Model-View-Controller. Before deep-diving into our app let’s talk about two things: What is the MVC model? How are we going to implement it in our application? As we can see MVC is made up of three different words Model, View, and Controller, all three have their own significance in software design patterns, in our case application. Let’s talk a little more about them separately in terms of our application.
- Model: A model represents the data related logic part of our application. The main function of our model is to perform CRUD applications to create a database and also to communicate with the controller. Here, MySQL will be used to create a model of our application.
- View: A view represents the User Interface(UI) part of our application. The main function of our view is to provide an aesthetic and user-friendly UI to the end-users, communicate to the controller and also, pass the dynamic value added by the user to the controller. Here, React and React Native will be used to create the View of our application.
- Controller: A controller represents the brain of our application. The main function of our controller is to receive request and input(in our case, GET request with the input of location i.e. all the psychiatrists in that location and many more) from the browser and ask the model to perform the desired request on the data and then to pass that data to the browser with the help of view(to make it representable). Here, Express.js will be used to create the controller of our application.
Brief representation of how MVC model works:
Implementation: Psy-care is a mental peace web app that targets people who are suffering from mental health issues, psychologists trying to make a mark in India and college graduates pursuing a degree in psychology. Psy-care aims to provide a one-stop solution to the increasing gap between the availability of medical professionals and people in need of help.
- We aim to shift this process of consulting a psychologist from offline to online mode. When a user opens the application, he/she will be provided with an option to stay anonymous or to reveal their identity. A psychologist/ therapist/ medical professional will be assigned to each user and some questions will be asked to the user according to which the state of his/her mind will be decided.
- If the case is of stage 1 then it can be assigned to the trained volunteers otherwise the professionals will take over. These volunteers can be college graduates pursuing psychology or related subjects. This way, we will eliminate the lack of therapists available in the country and also provide opportunities to upcoming professionals.
- There will be a location filter, based on which a person choose therapists in their location in case he/she wishes to contact them personally.
- The progress of the patient will be maintained and every interaction with the therapist will be confidential.
- Another feature of the app will be a daily motivation section, which will include calming exercises, meditation sessions etc.
Future Prospects: We aim to build a complete working application soon, contact therapists and medical professionals from around the country, starting from our college. We will further expand our project by collaborating with various mental health communities and educational institutes so that more people can benefit from this.
Implementation of a machine learning model which can recognize the mental state of people based on the questionnaire provided can also be done.
Team Members:
- Nityaa Kalra
- Ayush Agrawal
- Shourya Chirania