TrueDetect: A Wearable Machine Learning-Based Diagnostic and Evaluation System for Stress, Anxiety, and Depression Detection. wins Rep. Mark DeSaulnier’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 11th District
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier has named Krisha Singhani, a 10th Grader at Monte Vista High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 11th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of TrueDetect: A Wearable Machine Learning-Based Diagnostic and Evaluation System for Stress, Anxiety, and Depression Detection., the student said, ”At the start of this school year, I found myself observing the people around me, my friends, peers, teachers, etc. Everyone seemed to be unhappy and dealing with stress, anxiety, and quite a few people also had depression. When I asked them why they didn’t get help, they said that they or their guardian thought it was just regular academic and social stress and dismissed it due to the stigma around mental health. Until stress leads to depression because they thought they could handle it and didn’t get help, and they have no concrete evidence telling them (or their guardians) that something is wrong. So many suicides, self-harms and even gun violence could have been prevented if there was this concrete evidence. This is not only impacting individuals but is also impacting society. We need to address this now. We have at-home kits/tools to measure everything: diabetes, cholesterol, even COVID, and yet we have nothing for this. So I began thinking about if we could create that substantial evidence, that reliable, usable at home or at doctor’s offices, tangible, affordable, measuring tool.”
The Congressional App Challenge smashed previous participation records in 2022. All told, 9,011 students registered for this year’s competition – creating 2,707 fully-functioning apps for 335 Members of Congress across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. This year’s competition set the record for most student registrations, most apps submitted, most apps per district submitted, and most districts receiving over 20 apps. The wildly successful competition continues to impress upon House Members the importance of computer science education and the need to develop a pipeline of diverse, domestic STEM talent.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and each winning team is invited to showcase their winning app to Congress during our annual #HouseOfCode festival. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from Omidyar Network, AWS, Rise, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2023 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2023, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.