Design and develop a prototype for microsoft imagine cup 2024 (B)

Abstract

The importance of mental health has been on a rising trend especially after the pandemic, where more sought-after help when being cooped at home led to undesirable frustrations and less outlet to relive stress, negatively impacting mental health of many. Luckily, the rapid advancements in technology allowed ideas and solutions to be created even with the physical disconnectedness. Seeing how technology can aid and close the gaps in the mental health environment in an inexpensive manner, we reached out to several art therapists in Singapore to gather more information about the industry and their work.

An initial discussion with art therapists who were willing to share their expertise and needs at this juncture were made in retrospect to the needs of their art therapy sessions. This brought up the idea of having a platform that acts as a safe space for their clients to do reflection journals. This stemmed from how their art therapist might request for their clients or patients to do “homework” after their session ends, and before their next session with the art therapist with that, Artistique Journal was created.

Artistique Journal is a full-stack web application development project, targeting art therapists and their clients, with distinct features that aims to provide a platform and a safe space for users and clients with their art creation and journaling entries. Features include a login and registration page, whiteboard, chatbot, journaling entry, grounding activities, recommended activities, word cloud, and past artworks.

The features in Artistique Journal allows users to save their artwork and journal entries, while their engagements and conversations with chatbot and feedback ratings for the activities will be recorded in Google Firestore Database for art therapist’s reference.

The web application was developed using React.js, which is an open-source Javascript library used to build interactive user interfaces (UI) with efficiency. The development of Artistique Journal web application is primarily made up of two components, frontend development and backend development.

The web application’s frontend was first designed through Figma, then further developed in Visual Studio Code using ReactJS, this builds the look of our web application, with its key functions and features.

Backend was then brought in to complete this web application, with Azure’s machine learning models trained and re-trained python scripts linked into the frontend via Application Programming Interface (API), our web application allows analysis of images, wordcloud formation, user-chatbot engagement, all in real time.

After all this, the web application is completed with the goal to provide an accessible and inexpensive platform for clients to engage with artistic version of therapy for their mental health, and for art therapist to keep track of their client’s progress.