Lifeline Link

Helping Save Lives, One Connection at a Time

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the stories of the hundreds of people in the United States who die every day from suicide. We hoped to make a website that would support the people who would come across Lifeline Link and hope to convince them to not take their lives. Our driving factor in our mission was to do the most moral thing one can do, prevent the deaths of those around us.

What it does

We created a website that supports those experiencing thoughts of suicide and helps those who want to assist others with suicide prevention know what the best things to do are. Additionally, we use a data-driven approach to display the maximum amount of useful data that we can to allow people to truly understand a major problem in the world around us. We used modern technologies to influence and display data including AI and Next.js.

How we built it

First, we knew that we wanted to use Next.js and Cloudflare Workers AI. The fastest way to get these to work together was to use next-on-pages to allow us to use these in tandem. This would also permit us to use other Cloudflare services in the future of our project like Pages, our eventual public host. Continuing, we did a large amount of research into the mental health and suicide problems plaguing our world today. This allowed us to truly grasp the problems that we would hope to solve and motivated us to continue. We started with our code by creating our simple page structure and adding content to those pages. We made a mission to use animations in our project to make things look good for those viewing. Our first big hurdle came when implementing our map in leaflet.js. Leaflet.js didn't work in React, forcing us to use the leaflet-react wrapper library. This unfortunately caused complications with the tooltips and highlighting that we would have used. After about 12 hours of work and a lot of YouTube/StackOverflow/Phind AI time, we finally got it to work. Next, we tackled the next hurdle: D3. This was a much more minor hurdle, but still took around 3-4 hours to resolve the problems with the graph that we wanted to display. Finally, we added more resources, polished things up, and deployed!

Challenges we ran into

We ran into multiple challenges in this project. The largest problem was getting the leaflet.js map to work. As I stated previously, this sucked up a large amount of development time, stopping us from adding as many features and charges as we wanted to. Another issue that we had was that the hackathon took place when the Math Team went to State since one of us wasn't able to work for the first day. We also experienced an error where our build did not continue, however thanks to the power of git, we were able to find the issue without facing as large a hiccup.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of making something that can help thousands of people and participating in our first hackathon.

What we learned

We learned that we have limits to the amount of stuff that we can write in a weekend. This taught us to have better time management. We also learned how to use a bunch of new libraries like leaflet.js and d3.js.

What's next for Lifeline Link

We hope to continue to increase our availability of resources for other countries that struggle with rising suicide rates. We also hope to add more graphs and tables in our site to increase the amount of information that we are able to present.

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