Record your happy, sad and motivational moments with our web-app. We hope to help you with your mental health during this time. When things get hard, remind yourself with a happy moment that has happened in your life, and motivate yourself with the goals you have set for yourself! We plan on further develop this site and increase customizability in the future.
## 💡 Inspiration

We got inspiration from or back-end developer Minh. He mentioned that he was interested in the idea of an app that helped people record their positive progress and showcase their accomplishments there. This then led to our product/UX designer Jenny to think about what this app would target as a problem and what kind of solution would it offer. From our research, we came to the conclusion quantity over quality social media use resulted in people feeling less accomplished and more anxious. As a solution, we wanted to focus on an app that helps people stay focused on their own goals and accomplishments.

## ⚙ What it does

Our app is a journalling app that has the user enter 2 journal entries a day. One in the morning and one in the evening. During these journal entries, it would ask the user about their mood at the moment, generate am appropriate response based on their mood, and then ask questions that get the user to think about such as gratuity, their plans for the day, and what advice would they give themselves. Our questions follow many of the common journalling practices. The second journal entry then follows a similar format of mood and questions with a different set of questions to finish off the user's day. These help them reflect and look forward to the upcoming future. Our most powerful feature would be the AI that takes data such as emotions and keywords from answers and helps users generate journal summaries across weeks, months, and years. These summaries would then provide actionable steps the user could take to make self-improvements.

## 🔧 How we built it

### Product & UX

* Online research, user interviews, looked at stakeholders, competitors, infinity mapping, and user flows.
* Doing the research allowed our group to have a unified understanding for the app.

### 👩‍💻 Frontend

* Used React.JS to design the website
* Used Figma for prototyping the website

### 🔚 Backend

* Flask, CockroachDB, and Cohere for ChatAI function.

## 💪 Challenges we ran into

The challenge we ran into was the time limit. For this project, we invested most of our time in understanding the pinpoint in a very sensitive topic such as mental health and psychology. We truly want to identify and solve a meaningful challenge; we had to sacrifice some portions of the project such as front-end code implementation. Some team members were also working with the developers for the first time and it was a good learning experience for everyone to see how different roles come together and how we could improve for next time.

## 🙌 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Jenny, our team designer, did tons of research on problem space such as competitive analysis, research on similar products, and user interviews. We produced a high-fidelity prototype and were able to show the feasibility of the technology we built for this project. (Jenny: I am also very proud of everyone else who had the patience to listen to my views as a designer and be open-minded about what a final solution may look like. I think I'm very proud that we were able to build a good team together although the experience was relatively short over the weekend. I had personally never met the other two team members and the way we were able to have a vision together is something I think we should be proud of.)

## 📚 What we learned

We learned preparing some plans ahead of time next time would make it easier for developers and designers to get started. However, the experience of starting from nothing and making a full project over 2 and a half days was great for learning. We learned a lot about how we think and approach work not only as developers and designer, but as team members.

## 💭 What's next for budEjournal

Next, we would like to test out budEjournal on some real users and make adjustments based on our findings. We would also like to spend more time to build out the front-end.
# We'd love if you read through this in its entirety, but we suggest reading "What it does" if you're limited on time

## The Boring Stuff (Intro)

* Christina Zhao - 1st-time hacker - aka "Is cucumber a fruit"
* Peng Lu - 2nd-time hacker - aka "Why is this not working!!" x 30
* Matthew Yang - ML specialist - aka "What is an API"

## What it does

It's a cross-platform app that can promote mental health and healthier eating habits!

* Log when you eat healthy food.
* Feed your "munch buddies" and level them up!
* Learn about the different types of nutrients, what they do, and which foods contain them.

Since we are not very experienced at full-stack development, we just wanted to have fun and learn some new things. However, we feel that our project idea really ended up being a perfect fit for a few challenges, including the Otsuka Valuenex challenge!

Specifically,

>
> Many of us underestimate how important eating and mental health are to our overall wellness.
>
>
>

That's why we we made this app! After doing some research on the compounding relationship between eating, mental health, and wellness, we were quite shocked by the overwhelming amount of evidence and studies detailing the negative consequences..

>
> We will be judging for the best **mental wellness solution** that incorporates **food in a digital manner.** Projects will be judged on their ability to make **proactive stress management solutions to users.**
>
>
>

Our app has a two-pronged approach—it addresses mental wellness through both healthy eating, and through having fun and stress relief! Additionally, not only is eating healthy a great method of proactive stress management, but another key aspect of being proactive is making your de-stressing activites part of your daily routine. I think this app would really do a great job of that!

Additionally, we also focused really hard on accessibility and ease-of-use. Whether you're on android, iphone, or a computer, it only takes a few seconds to track your healthy eating and play with some cute animals ;)

## How we built it

The front-end is react-native, and the back-end is FastAPI (Python). Aside from our individual talents, I think we did a really great job of working together. We employed pair-programming strategies to great success, since each of us has our own individual strengths and weaknesses.

## Challenges we ran into

Most of us have minimal experience with full-stack development. If you look at my LinkedIn (this is Matt), all of my CS knowledge is concentrated in machine learning!

There were so many random errors with just setting up the back-end server and learning how to make API endpoints, as well as writing boilerplate JS from scratch.

But that's what made this project so fun. We all tried to learn something we're not that great at, and luckily we were able to get past the initial bumps.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

As I'm typing this in the final hour, in retrospect, it really is an awesome experience getting to pull an all-nighter hacking. It makes us wish that we attended more hackathons during college.

Above all, it was awesome that we got to create something meaningful (at least, to us).

## What we learned

We all learned a lot about full-stack development (React Native + FastAPI). Getting to finish the project for once has also taught us that we shouldn't give up so easily at hackathons :)

I also learned that the power of midnight doordash credits is akin to magic.

## What's next for Munch Buddies!

We have so many cool ideas that we just didn't have the technical chops to implement in time

* customizing your munch buddies!
* advanced data analysis on your food history (data science is my specialty)
* exporting your munch buddies and stats!

However, I'd also like to emphasize that any further work on the app should be done WITHOUT losing sight of the original goal. Munch buddies is supposed to be a fun way to promote healthy eating and wellbeing. Some other apps have gone down the path of too much gamification / social features, which can lead to negativity and toxic competitiveness.

## Final Remark

One of our favorite parts about making this project, is that we all feel that it is something that we would (and will) actually use in our day-to-day!