Health Innovation Case Studies

Isolation to Innovation: The Dropby Journey

In 2018, my team and I aimed to solve one of the most pervasive yet often overlooked challenges in mental health: isolation. At its heart, isolation isn’t just about being alone—it’s about lacking meaningful connections. In high-pressure environments like universities, where people are juggling academic stress, cultural transitions, and personal challenges, this sense of disconnection can lead to anxiety, depression, and other mental health struggles.

The idea for Dropby was to address this problem by building a system that didn’t just treat mental health issues but worked to prevent them by fostering meaningful, real-world connections. Over time, it grew into a massive project involving collaborations with the Mental Health Department, Biostatistics, Health Informatics, and Engineering teams. We worked with postdoctoral researchers from multiple disciplines and had the invaluable support of Vidar Andersen, founder of Plone, the communication system used by the FBI and CIA, who helped with concept development. We built a comprehensive system designed to connect people, improve well-being, and gather never explored data points to understand the links between behavior and health.

A Tool and Public Health

Dropby was more than a social platform. It was a privacy-first public health system built around two goals:

To foster meaningful real-world connections that reduce isolation and improve mental health.
To gather and analyze data that could reveal patterns between social interactions, physical activity, and mental health outcomes.

The idea was simple but powerful: By connecting people through shared activities and integrating health insights, we could tackle isolation while building a better understanding of well-being.

How it worked

Our system featured a mobile application designed to connect people in an engaging ways. It leveraged maps, physical movement, and proximity to other devices to create opportunities for users to find and join activities happening in their area. The app provided an intuitive interface where users could select and participate in events based on their interests, fostering real-time interactions. The system highlights includes:

1. Connecting Through Activities

The platform focused on bringing people together based on shared interests. Users could choose activities like cycling, coffee meetups, or study groups, and the system matched them with others nearby who shared the same preferences. Early versions supported one-on-one connections, while later updates added group activities and an interactive map that displayed real-time events. This feature made both planned and spontaneous interactions easy and enjoyable.

2. Privacy-First Design

Privacy and safety were central to the platform’s design. Profiles were verified through the university system to ensure users were real and accountable. The system allowed users to see only up to 10 nearby connections within a 1-mile radius, creating a balance between connection opportunities and privacy. By leveraging Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) instead of GPS, the platform provided precise, localized connections while protecting users’ location data, ensuring trust without compromising functionality.

3. Real-Time Features

One of the most innovative aspects of the platform was its real-time functionality. Users could see ongoing activities on an interactive map, join events instantly, and communicate through a built-in messaging system. Dynamic scheduling features matched users based on their availability and preferences, making social interactions seamless and spontaneous.

4. Data-Driven Insights

Beyond creating connections, the system aimed to understand the impact of social activities on health. By integrating data from wearable devices—such as heart rate variability, sleep patterns, and activity levels—with in-app behavior, the platform provided personalized insights into how social interactions influenced mental and physical well-being. These insights also supported broader public health research, linking user behavior to measurable health outcomes.

A Collaborative Effort

Dropby was the result of a truly multidisciplinary collaboration, bringing together expertise from a diverse range of fields. Mental health professionals, biostatisticians, health informatics researchers, engineers, and business strategists worked side by side to tackle both technical and human challenges. This integration of perspectives ensured that Dropby was not only technologically advanced but also deeply rooted in evidence-based mental health strategies, with a clear path toward long-term sustainability.

The collaboration played a pivotal role in navigating the complexities of software and medical device development, addressing both regulatory and technical hurdles. Postdoctoral researchers from various departments brought cutting-edge insights to refine Dropby’s design and expand its capabilities. Faculty from the Bloomberg School of Public Health contributed to developing robust analytics to measure outcomes, while experts from the Carey Business School worked on creating a scalable and sustainable business model. This ensured that Dropby had the potential to grow beyond its pilot phase and become an impactful public health tool for diverse communities.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Dropby’s development was the active engagement of hundreds of students from Johns Hopkins University. These students didn’t just test the system—they were integral to its design. Their feedback helped shape key features, such as activity-centric group meetups and real-time event notifications, ensuring that the app was user-driven and addressed their real-world needs. By incorporating student voices, Dropby became a relevant and practical solution for the challenges its users faced.

This unique combination of expertise, creativity, and collaboration made Dropby much more than an app. It became a system designed by the very people it aimed to serve—a powerful, impactful tool for mental health and community building. Dropby stands as a testament to what can be achieved when diverse disciplines unite with a shared commitment to creating meaningful, user-focused innovation.

Technology Challanges

Building Dropby’s networking system was both exciting and challenging. The app used a combination of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)and GPS-based mapping to connect users in real-time while keeping their privacy protected. GPS helped power a map feature that allowed users to see and join activities happening across a large area, like campus-wide events. Meanwhile, BLE was used for short-range, precise connections indoors, where GPS often struggles to work well. By combining these two technologies, Dropby aimed to create a system that was both accurate and scalable. However, making this work wasn’t easy.

One of the main challenges was power consumption. BLE is supposed to use less power than GPS, but in places with a lot of users—like crowded lecture halls or libraries—devices sometimes overheated, and their batteries drained quickly. This became a bigger issue when many devices tried to connect at the same time, which often caused the system to overload and stop working properly. This made it harder for Dropby to reliably connect users in these situations.

Another issue was accuracy. BLE didn’t always correctly estimate how close people were to each other. Sometimes it detected users who were far away (false positives), and other times it missed users who were nearby (false negatives). These errors affected the app’s ability to make connections that felt seamless and precise, especially in indoor spaces where accuracy was really important.

There were also challenges with getting Android and iPhone devices to work together. BLE behaves differently on each operating system, so creating a system that worked consistently across both required a lot of extra effort. This issue became even more obvious during the early development of COVID-19 contact tracing apps, which faced similar problems. It wasn’t until Apple and Google introduced new standards that these issues started to improve. Today, technologies like AirTags make BLE systems seem simple, but at the time Dropby was being built, overcoming these technical hurdles was a big achievement.

Despite these challenges, the combination of BLE and GPS in Dropby was a forward-thinking approach. BLE made it possible to create precise, short-range connections indoors, while GPS allowed users to see activities happening across larger areas. This mix helped Dropby maintain user privacy while offering a system that was scalable and practical. While it wasn’t perfect, the lessons learned from developing Dropby paved the way for improvements in public health technology and other tools that rely on proximity-based networking. It was a groundbreaking effort that pushed the limits of what was possible at the time.

Why Dropby Was Important—and Still Is

Dropby was more than an app—it was a vision for addressing isolation and improving mental and physical health in a proactive, thoughtful way. Its importance lies in how it tackled problems that are often overlooked but deeply impactful, particularly for students in high-pressure environments like universities.

The research behind Dropby was central to its design and impact. Over a year, we studied how isolation affects students, focusing on those new to campus and international students. What we found was striking: many of these students felt excluded, disconnected, and overwhelmed. They struggled to access university resources, navigate cultural and academic differences, and build meaningful relationships. These stressors not only limited their networking opportunities and personal growth but also placed a heavy toll on their mental health. In some cases, this led to severe outcomes like depression, anxiety, and even loss of life. These tragedies were preventable, and Dropby aimed to be part of the solution.

The app was designed to prevent mental health challenges, not just treat them. By fostering meaningful connections through shared activities, Dropby addressed the root causes of isolation. It encouraged students to build networks, engage in physical activity, and take advantage of real-time opportunities to connect with their peers. This proactive approach set it apart from traditional mental health tools, which often focus on intervention after problems have already escalated.

Dropby also represented a new way of thinking about public health technology. Its integration of real-world connections with data-driven insights created a system that was both practical and innovative. By combining behavioral data from the app with health metrics from wearable devices, Dropby could offer personalized suggestions for improving mental and physical well-being. This made it more than just a social tool—it became a measurable, impactful way to link behavior to health outcomes.

The project’s open-source foundation was another critical element. By making the system open, we aimed to empower others to study, adapt, and improve it. This collaborative approach reflected our belief that tackling isolation and improving mental health should be a shared effort, not limited to one institution or community. We wanted Dropby to inspire similar innovations in other universities, workplaces, and communities worldwide.

The journey of building Dropby also highlighted the challenges of creating such a system. Through three versions, we learned the importance of safeguarding privacy, preventing harassment, and ensuring the system was scalable and reliable. These lessons not only strengthened Dropby but also provided insights that influenced broader public health tools, like digital COVID contact tracers.

Even though Dropby’s trial was gravely impacted the Covid19 pandemic, its taught us how to build innovative large systems aligned for better health. It helped to understand designing solutions based on empathy and empathetic collaborations. Dropby mattered because it wasn’t just about networking—it was about saving lives, understanding relevant data points that are reliable and valid.