'I can't leave. Nobody's leaving. I have to stay and help.' That’s the words of Dr. Lorna Breen, the emergency room director of the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. At the end of her 12 hour shifts, she couldn’t leave all the COVID19 patients there, she wanted to help. On April 26, she died of suicide.
This is the reality that health-care front-line workers face on a day-to-day basis. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased work hours and made work conditions more life-endangering to millions of healthcare workers around the country, adding more burden to an already stressful job. These effects aren’t limited to healthcare workers: individuals all around the country have been forced to minimize time outside as well as social interactions, both of which have negative effects towards mental health.
Introducing CareDuet.
The all-in-one platform that allows individuals to duet with celebrities to send messages to healthcare workers. This can be done in 3 easy steps.
- Request a celebrity to film a customized message.
- Duet. Add your own spin to a message.
- Send your message.
According to a study done by the National Institute of Health, after renowned actress Angelina Jolie discussed genetic testing for breast cancer, there was a significant spike in testing for breast cancer among the public, with this phenomenon being coined the Angelina effect by Time magazine. This can be extrapolated to our project, with celebrities speaking about mental health raising awareness about these issues, and encouraging people to monitor their own mental health.
The main functionality of this program was built on ReactJS, a javascript library for building user interfaces. We first made a sketch of the website in Adobe XD, then proceeded to create a UI design. We used react-webcam in order to record the videos for the duets and bootstrap for the forms. We utilized many firebase features to serve as our backend. Storage was used in order to get all of the duet videos, Firestore was used to store celebrity information, and Authentication was used for Google Sign-in. Given the short amount of time, we were not able to create a full-featured site, but the main features of our product have been implemented.
Our future plans consists of 3 main stages.
Stage 1 is Website Development and piloting. During this stage, we will be optimizing our features of the website and perform pilot tests in order to create a user interface that will cater to our target market.
Stage 2 will be creating a ramp up in marketing and promotion in order to get more celebrities and customers on the platform. We plan to use social media platforms and sponsorships in order to attract our users. We also plan to use a ramp up in customer acquisition cost through the use of incentives like affiliate.
Stage 3 is mainly about expansion into other target markets, like mental health help and music commissioning.