Overview
Seasonal Affective Disorder affects more than 15 million people in the U.S., with women four times more likely to be diagnosed than men. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic makes more people live with limited social interaction and reduced sun exposure, which are leading factors that could cause/exacerbate SAD. Better Weather is a web app which helps SAD sufferers combat their symptoms with proven interventions. Through its different feature pages, users have the chance to foster connectedness & peer support, relieve stress, increase exposure to sunlight, and ultimately improve their mood.
Target Stakeholders and Users
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of mood disorder in which people who have good mental health for the majority of the year develop depressive symptoms at the same time each year, usually in the winter. This webapp is designed to help people who suffer from SAD, no matter if they are formally diagnosed or just experiencing related symptoms and stress. In addition, people who do not have SAD are also welcome to use this web app to alleviate their mood and foster connectedness. This app may not be suitable for users with severe symptoms who need professional and immediate help.
Key Features & Benefits
Our designed solution is a functioning webapp that merges basic chat and recommendation features into a platform to make sufferers feel less alone. Besides the basic weather forecast feature, this webapp has three key feature pages:
- Travel Recommendation
- - Through recommendation algorithms, it displays to users sunnier locations to increase their light exposure & outdoor activities.
- Music Therapies
- - Many forms of music are both personally enjoyable and great anti-SAD mood tools. They are helpful in resetting people's nervous system and release tension. For this reason, we have included a series of music playlists like Binaural Beats Music, Focus Music, Healing Music and more.
- Chat Rooms
- - Chat rooms include one-on-one chat and peer-support group chat. By giving users a chance talking to similar people, we aim to facilitate connectedness, build up networks of self-help, and overall give the SAD group better coping strategies and support.
Overall, we aim to help people understand SAD and help sufferers feel validated, help sufferers feel less alone, and boost their mood. Out of all the apps that aim to tackle mental health problems, few are designed specifically for those who suffer from SAD. Furthermore, compared to pervasive weather apps on the market, our site is trying to demonstrate forecast information with more empathy using pleasing images and UI.
Demo Video
Project Status
This webapp is a designed product by Team Boba in University of Washington Information School Capstone project for Winter/Spring 2021. As of now, we have chosen to keep our app open source so that other developers in the mental health space can view and use our code in their own projects. There is not much in the way of apps for those suffering from seasonal affective disorder and we created Better Weather, first and foremost, to help people. For a detailed handoff documentation and more info, please visit our Github Page.