EcoSystems

Spending sustainably

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Inspiration

Climate change is largely known for its destructivity. It gradually strikes our planet making it more and more uninhabitable for all living species. However, many don’t know that climate change also takes a large toll on our mental health. With the climate directly impacting our environment, agriculture becomes harder and our available resources start to dwindle. These effects cause people to face higher levels of stress as some people are forced to relocate or work harder to obtain previously available and affordable resources. Additionally, climate change causes natural disasters to increase in number, thereby increasing the stress and the possibility of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among people around the world. According to the American Psychiatric Association, even the growth in air pollution and increased temperatures causes an increased risk of neurological and psychiatric conditions like dementia and strokes. Furthermore, many people are now being directly affected, facing ecological anxiety as climate change is creating an unstable future for them and their next generation. As a result, we created the app EcoSystems to target climate change and its underlying impact on the general public's mental health.

What it does

Our project, EcoSystems, is an application that compiles a user’s transaction history from specific vendors like Amazon and Ebay or from user-scanned receipts so that our AI can analyze each purchase and even generate general trends about one’s purchases. Using this information, the AI will then independently provide feedback on how to be more sustainable via a simple user-friendly chat and some graphs describing the trends of your purchases. Furthermore, within our application, users can compete with one another through the leaderboard feature or even strive to complete goals and obtain rewards, offering people a fun incentive to be more sustainable.

For instance, if the user regularly buys plastic water bottles, the AI will inform the user of a more sustainable and potentially cheaper alternative. If the user decides to purchase the given recommendation, they will earn a certain amount of rating points which could earn them awards or progress them to the next rank. Furthermore, these points can be used to beat their online friends in the leaderboard feature, thereby creating a fun incentive to be sustainable. However, if the user continues with their original choice, perhaps due to specific circumstances and reasons, the AI will inform the user about the negative effects of that decision and what the user could do to minimize the environmental harm they might cause. This action allows our application to spread awareness and knowledge about unsustainable practices no matter the circumstance and potentially decrease the mental health issues arising from climate change.

How we built it

To create our application, we first used Flutterflow to create the front-end pages and the user interface. We then used Firebase with Flask for our backend. While Firebase holds our database and authentication system, Flask runs our AI API services. These AI API services are provided by Cohere. We then trained the Cohere AI model for our own needs — sustainability. Using this AI model, along with some Flutter changes, we created methods that changed the user’s state. What this meant was a customized experience for each user!

Challenges we ran into

We faced many challenges through the development of this app. One challenge we faced had to do with the incentivization of the project. We initially struggled to determine what would make our app appealing and engaging to the general public. However, we solved this issue by gamifying sustainability and connecting users across the platform through the leaderboard, friends, and rewards features. Another challenge we faced was accessing the customer’s information. We realized our application needs to be personalized to the user and needs to track the user’s spending habits while maintaining the user’s privacy. To do this, we allowed the user with multiple features. For instance, they could provide their login information for a specific vendor (Amazon/eBay/etc.) so that we can use an API to scrape their online purchases. If they don’t feel comfortable with providing this information, they can manually scan in their paper receipts to our AI. Making such features allows our users to feel safe and comfortable while using our app. Lastly, we faced some technical difficulties which we had to resolve. Since the Cohere AI needed to parse through Firebase, JSON, queries, and other files, integrating the systems was especially difficult. Additionally, moving the app from Flutterflow to Flutter was quite arduous. For instance, some dependencies in Flutter could not be integrated due to version issues. We had to do some shifting to get everything fine. In addition, coming up with the app and how it was laid out was also quite difficult. Thankfully, we had created a base design for us to follow, which allowed our app to turn out to be quite user-friendly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We would say completing this app is an accomplishment that we're personally proud of! We believe we successfully created an application that could potentially reduce the effects of climate change not only on mental health but also on the environment. Furthermore, completing an almost fully developed app in just two days is a pretty big achievement, especially since this app can be shipped across many different platforms. For these reasons, we are proud of EcoSystems!

What we learned

Through the creation of our application, we were able to learn more about climate change and increase our awareness of how much waste our generation creates and how climate change has a growing impact on many people's mental health. We also learned how to collaborate and communicate better to efficiently complete our project. Lastly, we would say the BIGGEST thing we've learned is how to use ai in our projects.

What's next for EcoSystems

With more time in the future to improve EcoSystems, we would improve our services by creating more impactful rewards and giving more recognition to those that are changing their lifestyle by becoming more sustainable. Additionally, we would further incorporate AI to fully analyze the trends in one's purchase history. Finally, after this app becomes a fully functioning model, we will attempt to publicize it for people to install on their phones, allowing for a better environment and overall mental health.

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