GymBuddies

Inspiration

Getting in shape is tough. Staying in shape is even harder, especially with the many social activities, extracurriculars, jobs, school work, and other stressful happenings that occur in our day to day lives. Staying healthy is the key to living longer and having a happier life and we wished to create an application that would help us and others in attaining this in a fun and supportive atmosphere.

How it works

This application brings people who want to stay healthy and get in shape together in an understanding, supportive, and energetic environment. With the global society we live in and the fact that humans are inherently social beings, this application brings these qualities together in order to help people in the journey to a healthier lifestyle while socializing and training at the same time. You create an account and look for people with similar training interests, capabilities, and nearby locations in our database. You can swipe people to the left saying you don’t like them, or you can swipe them to the right, saying you do like them and would wish to train with them. If you both of you wish to train together, you appear in each other’s matched lists and can then begin socializing and training.

Challenges

We ran into several challenges in the way. Besides the technical issues in the beginning with software and the Internet, many of us in the group were not experienced Android developers and we had to figure out how to use the given APIs available to us and make use of them. That was one of the easier challenges though. The biggest challenge we faced was implementing our matching algorithm in a fluid and interactive user interface for the user. This is a user based application and we wished to make it an amazing experience for the user.

What’s Next?

We still have bugs to work out and even many more features we wish to implement. We plan to add location based functionality, chat rooms/messaging, and more detailed profiles, so keep a look out for our app! GymBuddies has a bright future ahead of itself with what we want to do and we are excited for what is to come.