The problem Feel At Home solves

Feel At Home is our take of a social media platform focused on providing a healthy community to people suffering from mental health issues. One of the biggest problems that needs to be tackled is the fact that very often people who need help the most hesitate from asking for it. Our goal here is to create a community of people who are truly able to understand and sympathize with each other.
There can be three types of users: people who have overcome these issues, volunteers and people who are going through it. The main focus is to help establish trust between these people so that they can start sharing their burden. To facilitate this, several activities will be conducted which will help build stronger relationships between the participants. We will also create location-based groups that can immediately spring into action if the need arises. This will give a sense of accomplishment to all the members involved and helping others will increase their own self-worth. Some people may feel uncomfortable or may be present in an unhealthy environment due to which they may not want to disclose the information they share here, to tackle this we have included a spoof feature. The logo doubles as a button which will open a random website and hide user's activities and the chat history also gets cleared.
We will also use sentiment analysis to monitor the user posts and if they are below a threshold we will notify volunteers to pay more attention to that particular user. People can also report another as potentially suicidal, following which someone from our team will verify it themselves and notify the proper authorities before things go too far.
This will create a positive cycle and the people who were helped by the platform will feel encouraged to in turn help others, this will increase our reach as time goes on.

Challenges we ran into

One of the problems we faced was of user freedom. We did not want a very restricted environment where they begin to feel suffocated on the other hand we had to ensure that their situation does not further deteriorate because of us. We ended up relying on sentiment analysis to measure their status and step in only when necessary.
On the technical side, establishing friend requests and notifications through mongoosastic created some logical issues. But we anyhow tackled them using stack overflow and their documentation. Using the free version of azure services also limited us in certain directions.