EcoStride

EcoStride turns walks into real-world rewards. By gamifying mobility, we reduce carbon emissions, improve public health, and drive foot traffic to local stores. Small steps, big impact!

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EcoStride: Project Story

Inspiration

Modern urban centers are caught in an escalating trilemma: rising traffic congestion drives severe carbon emissions, sedentary lifestyles fuel chronic illnesses like hypertension and obesity, and municipal infrastructure monitoring suffers from expensive blind spots. Simultaneously, local brick-and-mortar businesses struggle with exorbitant digital advertising costs just to win customer foot traffic.

We realized that most people don't drive across town just because they love traffic—they drive for convenience on short trips. Traditional fitness trackers often fail to maintain daily engagement because they lack immediate, tangible positive reinforcement. What if we didn't try to ban cars outright, but instead rewarded people for making better choices on everyday short trips?

Guided by our core philosophy—"We don’t replace driving, but we reward better choices for short trips"—we envisioned EcoStride. We set out to build a platform that turns daily walking, jogging, and micro-mobility into a tangible currency that simultaneously cleans urban air, activates local commerce, and turns every citizen into an active custodian of their smart city.

What it does

EcoStride is a gamified, map-centric green mobility platform and civic ecosystem operating across four United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 3, SDG 9, SDG 11, and SDG 13):

  • Gamified Walking & Virtual Reforestation (SDG 3 & SDG 13): Every verified kilometer walked earns Eco-Coins and tracks direct carbon savings (0.17 kg CO₂ offset per km). Users can use their earned coins to plant virtual "Carbon Trees" across the interactive map, cultivating a visible digital forest that mirrors their real-world environmental impact.
  • Pay-per-Foot-Traffic Merchant Economy: Instead of paying for speculative online ads, local cafes and neighborhood retail shops join as verified "Energy Stations." Merchants offer exclusive vouchers redeemable via dynamic, in-app QR codes, paying nominal fees only when physical foot traffic arrives at their doors.
  • Crowdsourced Infrastructure Auditing ("Human-as-a-Sensor", SDG 9): Citizens actively report civic hazards such as road potholes, broken streetlights, missing drain covers, and fallen trees. Photos submitted through the app are processed by edge multimodal AI models that automatically classify damage, standardize technical descriptions, and assign a 1–10 safety risk score to help city councils triage repairs efficiently.
  • Geo-Social Exploration & Territory Conquests (SDG 11): Users drop asynchronous Trail Signposts (notes, photos, and tips) on the map to interact with fellow commuters, join community guilds, chat in real-time, and participate in localized "Oasis Zone" mileage battles to unlock collective rewards.
  • B2B AI Powered ESG & Scope 3 Corporate Reporting: Introducing automated corporate commuting analytics that calculate Scope 3 greenhouse gas reductions under the GHG Protocol and hit their corporate sustainability targets.

How we built it

EcoStride is engineered as a high-performance monorepo uniting mobile, serverless edge, and intelligent automation:

  • Mobile App (Android): Built using React 19, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, packaged natively via Capacitor 8. Interactive navigation and map exploration are powered by Mapbox GL JS with @turf/turf for geodesic calculations.
  • Serverless Edge Backend: Deployed globally on Cloudflare Workers with Hono, delivering sub-millisecond cold starts. Structured relational data is handled by Cloudflare D1 (edge SQLite).
  • Real-Time Communication: Powered by Cloudflare Durable Objects across three distinct stateful WebSocket architectures:
    1. CommunityChatRoom: Low-latency guild and neighborhood chats.
    2. IssueConversationDO: Dedicated 1-on-1 real-time civic case escalation between citizens and city officials.
    3. AuthorityCopilotDO: Ticket-gated WebSocket sessions enabling municipal officers to conduct multi-turn investigative debriefs with an AI copilot.
  • AI & Machine Learning Engine:
    • Multimodal Edge Vision & Civic Intelligence: Vision-Language Models (Gemini multimodal vision) running asynchronously via c.executionCtx.waitUntil() to evaluate civic hazard severity without delaying the user's report submission.
    • Sensor-Based Anti-Cheat Pipeline: Combines raw smartphone sensor data (accelerometer stride harmonics, gyroscope rotation, and GPS velocity thresholds) with teleportation anomaly filtering to differentiate genuine pedestrian strides from vehicle transit.
    • Antigravity AI Agent & Municipal Copilot: Intelligent workflow automation and context-aware investigation support for city authorities.
  • Storage & Authentication: Profile avatars, chat attachments, and civic photo evidence are stored in Cloudflare R2 with immutable edge caching, while secure user authentication is governed by Firebase Auth.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Ensuring Verification Fairness without Battery Drain: Battery-efficient background tracking was critical. Relying purely on GPS polling rapidly drained batteries, while standard step counters were easily spoofed by shaking devices or driving at low speeds. We implemented an Android foreground service using @capgo/background-geolocation and fused accelerometer stride frequencies with strict velocity gating and segment jump filters to discard spoofed mileage.
  2. Balancing Citizen Privacy with Geo-Social Dynamics: Real-time spatial tracking introduces privacy and data bloat risks. We solved this by enforcing strict spatial data lifecycles: interactive Trail Signposts naturally expire and despawn after 3 days, and virtual carbon trees expire after 7 days, maintaining a dynamic, clutter-free, and privacy-respecting map.
  3. Overcoming the "Cold Start" Merchant Loop: A reward economy collapses if users cannot redeem their coins locally. Recognizing that small cafes and retail shops are hesitant to adopt complex new POS hardware, we kept merchant onboarding frictionless: zero hardware required, self-service QR code redemption, and zero upfront advertising costs—merchants only provide discounts to customers who physically walk into their stores.
  4. Resilient Real-Time Edge State Management: Managing stateful WebSocket connections for multi-user chat and interactive AI briefings on serverless edge isolates presented race conditions. We introduced single-use 60-second cryptographic tickets stored in D1 to prevent replay attacks and paired them with serialization queues inside Durable Objects to handle concurrent interactions smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Complete Closed-Loop Sustainable Mobility Engine: Successfully aligned four disparate stakeholders—individual citizens, local businesses, municipal councils, and environmental targets—into a single mutually beneficial loop where healthy choices create real-world economic and civic value.
  • Zero-IoT Infrastructure Auditing: Empowered municipalities to gain real-time visibility into localized road and safety hazards using ordinary citizen smartphones, completely bypassing the need for multi-million dollar camera networks or redundant manual patrol fleets.
  • Production-Grade Serverless Architecture: Built a sub-second, globally distributed architecture on Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2, and Durable Objects capable of handling background location updates, live chat, and AI vision inference at negligible infrastructure costs.
  • Academic & Practical Alignment: Grounded our product design in established research on location-based gamification, proving that daily micro-incentives drive lasting behavioral decarbonization and higher foot-traffic conversion than traditional digital display ads.

What we learned

  • Incentives Must Outweigh Inertia: Abstract future goals like "fighting climate change" rarely motivate someone to walk under the hot sun. Concrete, immediate positive feedback—such as unlocking a 20% matcha latte discount or watching a virtual seed sprout on the street corner—transforms intention into sustained daily habit.
  • Keep Boundaries Crisp: By serving strictly as a data and traffic facilitator rather than trying to manage merchant inventories or municipal repair workflows, EcoStride remains lightweight, highly scalable, and easily deployable across any city worldwide.
  • The Power of the Edge: Combining serverless edge workers with Durable Objects proved that modern web architectures can deliver ultra-low latency real-time experiences without maintaining expensive, always-on dedicated server clusters.

What's next for EcoStride

  1. Wearable & Distributed IoT Sensor Integration: Expanding our crowdsourced data pipeline beyond smartphones to wearable smartwatches and modular environmental sensors, gathering hyper-localized microclimate metrics such as Air Quality Index (AQI), humidity, and ambient temperature during routine runs.
  2. Physical Merchant Beacons & NFC Touchpoints: Enhancing foot-traffic verification by deploying branded NFC tap-cards and low-energy Bluetooth (BLE) beacons inside partner "Energy Stations" for instant, one-tap coin redemptions and check-ins.
  3. Kinetic Energy Smart Bike Partnerships: Partnering with municipal bike-share operators to integrate kinetic-to-electric energy harvesting bicycles, funneling user-generated pedaling power back into localized smart city charging infrastructure.

Built With

  • android
  • antigravity
  • capacitor
  • cloudflare-d1
  • cloudflare-durable-objects
  • cloudflare-r2
  • cloudflare-workers
  • esg
  • firebase-auth
  • firebase-cloud-messaging
  • gemini-api
  • hono
  • iot
  • mapbox
  • react
  • rest-api
  • smart-city
  • sqlite
  • tailwindcss
  • turfjs
  • typescript
  • vite
  • websocket
  • yolo
  • zustand
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