Do you know there are apps that make it easy to help others, our planet, and ourselves so we lead more giving and meaningful lives? Check out four of the best ones and spring into action!

Be My Eyes

This app connects visually-challenged people in need of some help with sighted people with a few minutes of spare time to offer through video calls. The help needed may be something like finding a missing object in the home. This app is available in over 150 countries and in more than 150 languages. Volunteers register and detail which languages they speak. When someone needs help, a message reminder appears on their device.

Zooniverse

Want to help with cutting edge global research? Zooniverse is an app with millions of registered volunteers that lets you become a citizen researcher! Help professional scientific researchers through your mobile device or the companion website. Global volunteers don’t have a scientific background but their contribution is highly valued.

My Selfless Act

This is a social networking site and app promoting the idea of giving back to the community through volunteering. It offers information on local volunteering opportunities globally and encourages the sharing of ideas and activities.

Aloe Bud

Created by someone who struggles with his mental illness, routine and remembering daily self- care, Aloe Bud is a welcoming and simple self-care pocket companion app. It gently reminds users about self-care activities in physical, mental and emotional needs. These reminders relate to anything from drinking enough water to taking screen breaks to maintaining connections.

As technology develops, school students who are off class may have no fear of too much absence from class. A small robot may help those children recovering from a long-term illnesses in the hospital or at home. These children may feel isolated from their friends and classmates. The robot takes their place at school. Through the robot, the children can hear their teachers and friends. They also can take part in class from wherever they are recovering.

Anyone who has had a long term illness knows that recovering at home can be lonely. This can be especially true of children. They may feel left out. Now these children may have a high-tech friend to feel less alone. And that friend is a robot. The robot is called AV1. AV1 goes to school for a child who is at home while recovering from a long-term illness. And the child’s school friends must help. They carry the robot between classes and place the robot on the child’s desk.

A Norwegian company called No isolation created the robot. The co-founders of No Isolation are Karen Dolva and Marius Aabel. Dolva explains how the robot AV1 works. She says, from home, the child uses a tablet or phone to start the robot. Then they use the same device（设备）to control the robot’s movements. At school, the robot becomes the eyes, ears and voice of the child. The child can take part in classroom activities from wherever she/he is recovering-whether at home or from a hospital bed. The robot is equipped with speakers, microphones and cameras make communicating easy.

Engineers have put a huge garbage collector to gather plastic material in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, the world's largest spread of garbage, twice the size of the state of Texas.

The Ocean Cleanup organization created the collector. The group's founder, Boyan Slat, an inventor born in 1994, was just 16 when he was moved to clean up the oceans when he was on a dive and saw more plastic bags than fish

Last Saturday, a ship pulling the pipe-shaped floating barrier left San Francisco. Attached to it is a screening skirt that hangs three meters down in the water. The screen is designed to collect the plastic as it moves through the water. Sea animals can safely swim under the barrier

The cleanup system also comes with lights powered by the sun, cameras, and other special devices, so the system can communicate its position at all times. That way a support ship can find it every few months to remove the plastic that has been collected.

Shipping containers will hold all the plastic gathered , including bottles and fishing equipment and are expected to be back on land within a year. Then the plastic will be recycled. The free-floating barriers are made to survive extreme weather conditions and damage from continual use. They will stay in the water for twenty years , thus collecting 90% ofthe garbage in the area.

The Ocean Cleanup has received $ 35 million in donations to pay for the project, hoping to put 60 free-floating barriers in the Pacific Ocean by 2020. "It's important to turn off the taps on plastic entering the ocean, but I also think people can do more than one thing at a time to deal with this problem," Slat said.