After getting in a car accident on a
Sunday in December of 2012, Ruby Taylor found wanting to help people more
difficult. She said, “It changed
everything.” Before the accident, she was a social worker at the School
District of Lancaster who wrote a book titled “Confidence to Greatness for
Teenage Girls.”
Even after she went through a medical
treatment with medication, Taylor said she was deeply confused, unable to feel
or show emotion, uncharacteristically unable to control her cursing and stymied
by problems like fitting a pizza box into her garbage can. Taylor decided that
she had to find a way to brighten her mood and regain control of her emotions
after coming close to committing suicide.
She enjoyed looking at pictures and
quotes, and decided to use both in daily Facebook posts designed to help
herself and others. “’It took a while,’ said the 38-year-old Lancaster city
resident, who still frequently loses her train of thought and struggles to find
the words to answer detailed questions. ‘But then it worked. I began to smile.
I began to laugh again.’” She eventually found programmers to create an iPhone
and iPad app that makes it easier to combine photos and sayings, which she
titled “Smope”, a mashup of smiles and hope, and launched it in mid-September.
The price of this app is $1.99 and it is available through Apple’s iTunes
online store.
“This is my Smope,” she said, after demonstrating
how the app initially shows the photos in black and white and then fills them
gradually with color, and how it can send users different notifications at set
times of different things that are interesting. Taylor, who is currently
receives Social Security disability befits, says she would love to have Smope
become her regular source of income but knows how unlikely that would be. She
hopes the app will help uplift others brought down by brain injuries,
depression or other circumstances.
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