Healthaholic

Healthaholic Logo
Health checkup
'Time's Up' Notification
Water Tracker

Inspiration

We were inspired to create a chrome extension that will help users stay productive without sacrificing their mental health. Because of the pandemic, many people have been struggling to stay productive, maintain good mental health, or both, so we decided to design a product that aims to solve both of those issues.

What it does

Healthaholic is a Google Chrome extension that is a cross between a Pomodoro timer and a mental health check-in. When the program is opened, there is an option to start a Pomodoro timer to help with productivity and studying. This time will schedule periods of 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of break. For the purpose of the demonstration, however, we have reduced this time to 1 minute for studying and 30 seconds of break. The mental-health check-ins are also an important part of the project. When a new tab is opened, the page changes to a quick check-in webpage with reminders for self-care, inspirational quotes to keep users motivated and healthy.

How I built it

We built this program using Javascript, CSS, and HTML. it's our team's first time at a hackathon and none of us had any prior experience with any of these languages, so we ended up doing a lot of research and following some tutorials online. The mentors were also useful as they helped us solve some of the issues with the HTML and Javascript for the popup timer and webpage.

Challenges I ran into

Some of the challenges that we ran into were issues with debugging the code, issues pulling and pushing to/from the Github repository, and some issues getting started on the project as we didn't know where to even start. Some of the members in our group were unable to pull from the repository which led to many issues trying to figure out how to commit new changes. We also had issues with the headers and formatting on the webpage, but with some research and a little help from some mentors, we were able to figure it out. The last major issue we had was with the timing of the timers. Because we have 2 going at the same time, it was hard to schedule them and make sure they're not overlapping and triggering one another, but in the end, the issue was resolved and the timers now work perfectly. However, we were able to figure it out both on our own and with a little help from mentors.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our entire team is very proud of all that we've done. This was our first hackathon and none of us knew anything about chrome extensions or web development, so considering we came from not knowing anything to having a completed project is incredible. We're proud that we were able to work through many of the issues we had and accomplish so much in such a short time span. Our skills have improved immensely, and we're proud of how much we've learned and grown.

What I learned

Our entire team learned a lot about Javascript, HTML, CSS, APIs and many other aspects of this project. Coming from having absolutely no knowledge at the beginning of this project (we didn't even know how to use Github) to being able to create a functional program shows just how much we've learned about programming, time-management, debugging and knowing the limits of our own minds (both for how long we can stay awake and how much we can accomplish!)

What's next for Healthaholic

Because this is our first chrome extension, we know that it's not completely perfect, so in the future we would like to continue working on improving Healthaholic and its features. We would also like to add even more interactivity to the extension's webpage and possibly make use of more APIs to create an even more customizable and useful product.