💡 Inspiration
As our entire team consists of incoming university students, the infamous Freshman 15—an expression that describes the amount of weight some students tend to gain during their first-year of post-secondary—dawns upon us. We expect to have difficulties balancing a healthy physical life with the hectic and new environment post-secondary education brings. Moreover, in the midst of a pandemic, weight gain will become second nature... In response, we wanted to create an application targeted specifically to university students that encourages healthy living through exercise and daily nutrition.
🌱What it does
Fitness 15 tackles the problem of finding an exercise partner. It solves this issue by encouraging exercise, matching you with someone else with similar sports/physical activity interests, so that you can motivate and work out together, creating friendships along the way. It does this by storing your sports interests during signup, which is then used to match you with someone else with similar interests. Moreover, the app also tracks your location and provides you with nearby gym locations, so that you don’t have an excuse to go to the gym!
🚧 How we built it
- We used React Native for the frontend/UI
- When finding nearby gyms for users, we leverage the Geolocation API to retrieve the user's coordinates and then use those coordinates in Google's Places API to find gyms
- For the backend we used Nodejs and Expressjs to create a REST API to store and fetch users from our database
- For our database, we used MongoDB and also Mongoose for schema validation
⛔ Challenges we ran into
- Our group had no experience with React Native and was relatively new to working with backend. This meant that we spent a significant time learning new technologies and frameworks.
- With little to no experience with APIs, let alone API calls to the ones we used, obtaining data via requests and parsing that data was difficult.
- One challenge in specific was to develop a matching algorithm to connect users, as that required us to make a GET request to retrieve the users and search for a possible match
- As we were all beginners, we had some time constraints as a lot time was dedicated to learning and debugging
🏆Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Actually finishing the product
- Implementing location tracking so that nearby gym locations show up
- Creating a seamless navigation system that allows users to traverse through different screens easily
- Implementing a sign in feature and storing the data for later use (in the Profile and Home page)
- Creating a function that matches users to other users with similar sports interests
- Learning new technologies and putting them to use on something useful
🏁 What we learned
As our first Hackathon, we were introduced to the unique team environment brought about by the time restraint. This environment helped develop skills like collaboration and time management.
The Hackathon also gave us the opportunity to learn how to create a fully functional mobile app with React Native—a framework none of us have used before. We also explored many other smaller libraries/tools that we were oblivious to before.
📈 What's next for Fitness 15
Perfecting the matching algorithm. By building more in-depth user profiles, we can create a comprehensive matching program to increase the success of finding an exercise partner and build relationships.
Built-in conversations with your match. Similar to other texting applications, a built-in messenger would allow for users to avoid swapping in-and-out of the app to keep in contact with their match.
Nutrition tracker. With our app centered around fixing poor college diets, having an accessible nutrition tracker is a must. Studies show that counting calories makes people more cognizant of what causes issues in diet, and consequently how to fix those issues.
Social Media. Sharing your journey of improving your physical health is a core tenet of our app. One of our goals is to create public profiles you can follow to support them and also motivate yourself!
Daily Notification Check-ups. To keep students accountable, we will add notifications that reminds students to stay productive by taking breaks, planning to eat healthy, and obtaining daily exercise.
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