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Inspiration
Our inspiration came from StepUp, an app that gamifies fitness by tracking your steps and ranking you and your friends on a leaderboard, turning daily movement into a friendly competition. Seeing how StepUp motivates users to walk more through a fun challenge, we asked ourselves—what if we applied the same concept to sustainability?
What it does
EcoMate is an app that gamifies recycling e-waste into a competition between friends using a point system called EcoScore. The EcoScore is a sustainability score calculated through measuring the users' electricity and water usage on their monthly utility bill, which determines their carbon emissions and e-waste, factoring into their EcoScore. The EcoScore also factors in the user's trips to recycling centers, as well as creating a marketplace within the app where users can sell, donate, or trade old electronics instead of letting them go to waste. EcoMate ranks users and their friends on a leaderboard using their EcoScore, fostering friendly competition and motivation to adopt sustainable habits.
How we built it
We developed EcoMate using a combination of React Native for a cross-platform mobile experience and Firebase for real-time data management. Our backend leverages Node.js and Python, integrating AI-powered analysis to calculate your EcoScore.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we faced was developing the AI-powered chatbot, named Eco. While we aimed for the bot to provide personalized and relevant responses based on users' questions, we encountered issues where it would generate vague or unrelated answers instead of offering advice regarding the question.
Achievements that we're proud of
One of our biggest achievements was developing an AI-powered system that analyzes utility bills to estimate carbon emissions and provide personalized eco-friendly recommendations. We also overcame the challenge of irrelevant AI responses by tweaking the model to better understand user intent and generate more useful advice. Another accomplishment was implementing a leaderboard that ranks users based on their EcoScore, encouraging friendly competition and motivating users to make sustainable choices and updating scores accordingly.
What we learned
Building EcoMate taught us how to refine data processing for accurate carbon footprint calculations using OCR-based utility bill analysis. We also learned that gamification elements, like point-based incentives and implementing leaderboards by retrieving and ranking user data stored in the Firebase database, effectively motivate users to adopt sustainable habits. Additionally, working with AI-driven sustainability insights challenged us to fine-tune data accuracy, making recommendations more relevant and impactful for users.
What's next for EcoMate
We could expand EcoScore by incorporating more ways to earn EcoScore points, such as tracking public transit use, energy-efficient habits, and smart home integrations. We could also introduce streak rewards, badges, and eco-challenges to encourage users to stay consistent in their sustainability efforts.
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