FindU
An unconventional path to mental-wellbeing
Created on 7th March 2021
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FindU
An unconventional path to mental-wellbeing
The problem FindU solves
Seeking treatment for even mild mental health issue often leads to the person's social isolation, community ignorance, and prejudiced reviews at workplace. Due to these factors patient refrain from asking for mental health support and thus the mild issue lead to severe problems. While the stigma associated with visiting a psychiatrist is strong too be shaken, many platforms arose to help these patient using VR-AR technology. Hence, this app is about small scernario based game attempted in AR, to rejuvenate a perons's well-being by giving easy to do tasks and help them reclaim their lives. Instead of handing out a doctor's prescription, we provide a scenario based game where the player is in full control of his environmemt and works toward achieving their goal, be involved in physical activity etc. This game solves following problems :
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Provide sense to user that all is not lost , be hopeful: Through the game we want the player to reclaim their life, being the hero in the story, they will be motivated to proceed towards the goal and will observe that ups and down are part of life, what matters how creative and optimistic we can be with it.
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Making user comfortable to seek help using an unconventional approach
As per a study, South Asia represented approximately 23% of the global population and one-fifth of the world’s mental health cases (https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-018-1918-1). But still, we don't perceive this as an prevalent issue and refrain from seeking help. -
Why Gaming, You may Ask?
As per research reports (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7351552/), there hence been a 35% higher usage in multi-player games, recognizing which WHO rendered it's support with #PlayApartTogether campaign, pressing on the fact that online gaming activity was a huge stress buster and has a therapeutic effect.
Challenges we ran into
Game development is one of the most fun-seeking coding exercise where we have all the freedom to create stories and worlds as per our imagination. But with code comes bugs too. Hence adopting good programming was a must for us. Attending this hackathon virtually sometimes adds to problem to timings and problem approach ideation and problem solving hence we made out proper execution plan so that it can be completed in the give time frame. AR games require additional setting, so we have to work on the rotation, size of our model. Debugging while coding went well but a particular problem we faced was for testing purposes only 1 teammate had an AR-enabled device hence, we had to keep building and shipping apks to test the app. Since our problem statement targets people suffering from mental health issue we had to keep the app's overall theme and color code in mind so that it is soothing for the player and the game enviroment seems friendly and calming to them. Hence UX does play a crucial part in this game. Developing this game was not easy, while we implemented the majority of what we had planned, we shall continue to build on missing sections in due time.
Technologies used