Enloe High School duo win nationwide competition by developing app to aid underserved communities

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) -- Two students from Enloe High School in Raleigh can call themselves national award-winning app developers.

Lydia Owens and Lindsay Templeton are rising juniors at Enloe High's Academy of Health Sciences. For their sophomore project, the two decided to enter into the seventh annual Lenovo Scholar Network National Mobile App Development Competition.

"There were 128 teams, I think, with over 6,000 team participants," Owens said. "And, we were chosen as one of the teams."

The two started planning their app in mid-November 2020 and Templeton began coding it in December with a final product ready in February. They developed an app, Destigmatizing Healthcare which aims to provide mental and sexual health education resources to underserved populations.

"We have three main sections," Owens explained. "And, the hotline section has numbers for suicide mental health hotlines and other help hotlines that people can call on in case of emergencies. And, then the people color section, we have has resources for finding bilingual doctors for finding doctors of color. It also has resources or just for understanding on the language barrier and medicine and how it affects people undocumented for health care and other things like that and so we provide both educational resources and then actual links that people can go to and use in their everyday life for scheduling health care appointments," Owens added.

Templeton says the app also includes sections for mental health.

"We also have the LGBTQ area which includes a focus on mental health," Templeton explained. "LGBTQ youth are at a significantly higher risk for suicide and other mental health crises. So, we thought it was really important to push that getting LGBTQ is normal. It's okay, it's healthy." Templeton added.

Lenovo executives and employees made up the panel of judges for the app competition. The Fan Favorite winner will be announced at the virtual NAF Next conference on July 15.

View the top 5 app winners and vote here for the Fan Favorite.