CampHabits

With Camp Habits, we will help you accomplish your tasks and help you build your own virtual cabin. Move, and expand your horizon!

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Inspiration

Big part of our inspiration stemmed from an article about how important it is for elderly to still have independence, and possible ways to make this happen, and so we wanted to give them some sense of self-sufficiency.

Three main points of inspiration for us would be the goal to help them exercise, be empowered and be engaged.

EMPOWER: We wanted to promote decision making, which is why we incorporated it by them being in charge of the tasks they may possibly want to do per day. We also wanted to incorporate some fun in the skill, and so we added the designing aspect of the empty landscape.

EXERCISE: We believe that while they are enjoying the fun side of the skill, they are also being productive, moving their body, getting things done on their own. Tasks such as walking, stretching, exercising are part of our skill’s suggested tasks.

ENGAGED: Our skill encourages users to be more social by suggesting tasks related to communicating with friends or family. We incorporated camping inspired themes to the design because not all adults are able to freely explore outside especially ever since the pandemic hit, elderly people had to be extra cautious, so we wanted to give them something other than the insides of their house, where they could also let their creativity flow.

What it does

Camp Habits is an Alexa skill that aims to promote productivity among elderly by logging daily tasks and giving rewards after each task completion. Users are free to customize their landscapes by using their rewards as decorative pieces.

How we built it

We built Camp Habits through the use of various technologies. For the main flow, or alexa conversation, we utilized the Alexa-hosted lambda to create the code handlers for speech prompts. We also used the Alexa console to add the intents and connect these to handler functions. We also connected it to the Alexa-hosted DynamoDB to store user’s data such as name, date last opened, daily check in streak, most used task, etc.

The UI of the skill was created using React.JS, Yuka, three.js.

Challenges we ran into

We’re a team of backend programmers, frontend or user interface gave us a really hard time. We had to consider every viewport so that it can be compatible in every possible screen. The challenge for us was to learn the technologies needed to create an Alexa skill, but we easily overcame this through multiple sources of documentation freely available.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made an alexa skill for the first time. We managed to develop a web app using ThreeJS which is out of our comfort zone since working with 3D models is new to us. Also, using YukaJS as a game engine for automatic control of the characters.

What we learned

We learned how to make Alexa Skills, persist data, and integrate APL to our devices.

What's next for CampHabits

We believe that CampHabits is very scalable and is created with future improvements in mind. In the future, we thought of integrating direct connection to other skills, in certain cases where the user wants to do tasks with an existing Alexa Skill available for ease of use or perhaps for other platforms to be accessible through CampHabits. Possible improvement would also be to add contact information per user for emergencies, and for user progress to be shareable to other users who may be using the skill.

Thanks https://kenney.nl/ for the assets

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