I did some changes about the charts of our project.
Dylan Bing-Manners | Gabriel Faulhaber | Jiacheng Xu | Mitchell Larson | Vasundhara Gautam (team leader)
WinterMood is an online web application for multiple users to track correlations between their mood and the weather. It is based on Seasonal Affective Disorder, a mood disorder subset where people experience depressive tendencies around wintertime. Users can sign up or login, select their area and periodically identify their mood, as well as add data about their hours of sleep and exercise. A weather API will be used to record the weather based on the user’s chosen location. Users can also look at graphs of annual or monthly trends of their data or other long-term graphs of data by location.
Seasonal Affective Disorder affects between 2 and 3% of Canadians in their lifetime while another 15% experience a milder form of it. There are many applications allowing people to track their mood related to their exercise, sleep, etc. However, no existing applications we could find allow users to track its relation to the weather around them. The target audience would be users with existing depressive or anxious tendencies, especially those diagnosed with SAD. WinterMood would provide them with a tool to track how their mood relates to the weather, as well as the impact of other factors such as sleep and exercise.
This product makes it easy for users to, at a glance, see how different factors like the weather, sleep and exercise affect their mood. They can use this information to influence lifestyle changes and to understand themselves better. This app can also be useful for people who have not been diagnosed with SAD but suspect that they might have it. Tracking their mood and influences over some time would help them have a conversation with a psychologist or counsellor.
The main feature of this project is for users to track their mood and its influencers. Subproblems include extracting weather identifiers, computing statistics and creating graphs of mood against weather, sleep and exercise. We will be using the OpenWeatherMap API to get local weather. Apart from being able to enter and view their own data, a regular user can also view global statistics or graphs by location, e.g., their city. However, regular users would not have access to other users’ personal data. An admin would have viewing access of every user’s data.
As a group, we have strong C, C++, Python and general back-end programming skills. Some of us have worked with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but none of us have used Ruby on Rails before. One of us is very comfortable with PHP, MySQL and server-side database programming. One of us is taking a computational data science course this term, which would help with the data visualization we have planned.