Inspiration
BuddyUp began with a simple question: How might we help veterans take a personally meaningful step toward connection when showing up alone feels difficult?
Dance4Healing is a patented telehealth platform funded through an NIH/NIMHD SBIR Phase I award. Our experience has shown us that music, movement, and other creative arts can make healthy habits feel more personal, supportive, and enjoyable.
For the Veteran Innovation Hackathon, we focused that experience on a veteran-centered engagement challenge: creative activities may be available, but starting, finding something that fits, and returning consistently can still be difficult—especially when the experience feels generic or solitary.
We were also inspired by the veteran challenge-coin tradition. Challenge coins carry meaning because they recognize achievement, service, belonging, and shared identity. BuddyUp translates that spirit into respectful digital recognition for participation, consistency, creativity, and supporting others.
What it does
BuddyUp is a personalized creative-engagement and accountability platform designed to help veterans build connection through music, movement, and the arts.
The core experience guides a veteran through a simple eight-week journey:
- Create an account
- Complete a preference survey covering creative interests, goals, energy, and participation preferences
- Enroll in an eight-week program
- Receive a compatible Buddy match
- Explore personalized music, movement, and arts activities
- Track progress in My Journey, including movement toward a 150-minute weekly activity goal
- Earn challenge-coin-inspired badges for meaningful milestones
BuddyUp offers Solo and Buddy participation choices so veterans can begin at their own comfort level. A separate, text-based resource area keeps support information available without interrupting the creative activity experience.
BuddyUp is not intended to replace clinical care. It is designed to support creative engagement, accountability, and human connection.
How we built it
We used Lovable to rapidly build and refine the user experience and Supabase for authentication, data storage, and PostgreSQL database logic. We connected the project to GitHub so team members could collaborate and add activities without relying on one shared account.
The database organizes:
- Veteran preferences
- Eight-week program enrollment
- Buddy compatibility and matching
- Activity participation and weekly progress
- Badge definitions and earning criteria
- Each participant’s earned recognition
A PostgreSQL badge-evaluation function checks enrollment and activity metrics to determine when a milestone has been reached. It returns only newly earned badges so the application celebrates each achievement once.
We also adapted Dance4Healing’s visual identity into a respectful veteran-centered experience, using accessible typography, clear navigation, creative-arts imagery, and challenge-coin-inspired graphics without relying on stereotypical military design.
Challenges we ran into
Keeping the hackathon scope realistic
It was tempting to build live telehealth, messaging, notifications, wearable integration, a complete marketplace, and every future feature at once. We learned to treat scope as a design decision.
We focused on one coherent journey:
Authentication → Preferences → Eight-week enrollment → Buddy matching → My Journey → Progress → Badges
Optional Garmin/Terra integration, live telehealth, messaging, notifications, and deeper connections to Dance4Healing and 9MusesLive were intentionally deferred until the core experience was reliable.
Making digital recognition reliable
The badge engine revealed several subtle PostgreSQL issues. Non-tiered badges could potentially be inserted more than once because standard SQL treats null values as distinct. Repeated evaluations could also return badges a participant had already earned, and program-completion recognition could trigger too early.
We strengthened the uniqueness rule, updated the evaluation function to return only newly earned badges, and corrected the timing for program-completion recognition. This made the gamification system more trustworthy without changing the underlying product logic.
Making gamification meaningful
We did not want points and badges to feel childish or disconnected from veteran culture. Challenge coins inspired a more meaningful system that recognizes showing up, building consistency, engaging creatively, and contributing to community.
Balancing encouragement and accessibility
BuddyUp needed to feel motivating without becoming overwhelming. We prioritized plain language, clear next actions, readable controls, and simple progress feedback that can support veterans with different abilities and levels of technical confidence.
Accomplishments we are proud of
During the hackathon, we:
- Created a focused veteran-engagement layer rather than attempting to rebuild an entire telehealth platform
- Built the core eight-week enrollment and journey structure
- Developed a preference-based Buddy-matching experience
- Created a My Journey dashboard with weekly progress
- Implemented a database-backed badge engine
- Designed challenge-coin-inspired recognition
- Connected the application to GitHub for team collaboration
- Adapted the platform to a respectful, accessible veteran-centered visual theme
- Created a reusable engagement model that can later strengthen Dance4Healing’s broader programs
What we learned
Our biggest lesson was that a focused, reliable experience is more valuable than a long list of unfinished features.
We also learned that personalization is not only about recommending content. It includes helping someone find an activity that fits today, a participation style that feels comfortable, and another person who can make returning feel worthwhile.
Finally, gamification works best when it reflects identity and meaning. For BuddyUp, the goal is not simply collecting digital objects. It is recognizing progress, connection, creativity, and the decision to keep showing up.
What’s next
Our next steps are to:
- Continue co-design and usability testing with veterans
- Refine the Buddy compatibility model using veteran feedback
- Test whether veterans can complete the core journey without assistance
- Expand the creative activity library
- Add optional Garmin/Terra wearable integration
- Connect participants with Dance4Healing telehealth and 9MusesLive creative-arts programming
- Strengthen privacy, security, and accessibility for a future pilot
- Develop a co-designed pilot with a VA or veteran-serving partner
- Measure engagement, return rates, program completion, Buddy participation, social connection, and veteran satisfaction
Creativity opens the door. A Buddy helps a veteran walk through it.
Built With
- auth
- css
- github
- lovable
- postgresql
- react
- sql
- supabase
- tailwind
- typescript
- vite
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