ZenZone

Introduction

Teenager stress is a prevalent issue in our world right now. Many high schoolers and college students are facing a lot of stress due to competition with others, the pressure to succeed, or just to fulfill their own expectations of themselves. Teen stress and mental health challenges have become increasingly serious concerns in recent years, especially among high school and college students. Our project, ZenZone, combats this issue. Currently, mental health resources are hard to access, not personalized or intimidating as some people could be afraid of additional ridicule for using it. There is a growing need for accessible, personalized, and low-friction mental health support tools such as ZenZone. This app is designed as a centralized stress relief platform tailored specifically for teenagers, made by teenagers that understand the difficulties of people our age and wants to help alleviate this issue, even just by a little bit. This app combines journaling, meditation, exercise, music and AI recommendations for users.

Design

Stress affects teens differently, and “one size fits all” solutions often fail because the problem of stress cannot be generalized. Other times, teens may not know what coping strategies work best for them, and other times emotional states are subjective and variable. This leads into our recommendation/personalized system. Upon creating an account, the user will take a 20 question questionnaire for the app to automatically gauge the stress levels of the individual in order to give them their best personalized plan. The core features of this app are journaling, meditation timer, physical exercise journal, mood-based music playlists, AI recommendations, and gamification/badges. Journaling allows emotional reflection and long term tracking, so users can look back at their thoughts and emotions of the past and reflect on their growth. Music and exercise helps to regulate people’s emotions and helps them escape to a new world for them to relax in. Meditation helps users practice mindfulness, and the badges motivate users and give encouragement. The UI is very simple, very teen friendly design without much difficulty to figure out where everything is. For the model, we used GPT-4 to assist in evaluating and implementing a decision tree model as it displayed the best flexibility and validation support.

Limitations/Future

Our model also has a few limitations, however, due to factors such as the limited participants, which makes this app not representative of all teenagers. The simplicity of the decision tree model may also oversimplify the emotional complexity of teenagers, as every teenager experiences stress in different ways. It is also important to note that this app is not clinical advice, and it supports stress management; it is not a professional mental health diagnosis. In the future, we could incorporate more advanced machine learning models, improved personalization, or real time adaptation to improve user experience on this app.

Slideshow

If the slideshow does not load inline, you can open it directly here: ZenZone Presentation (1).pdf