HealthBud

Application targeted to women, for finding workout partners. Creates safe spaces for new mothers, students, and seniors​. Provides helpful tips about weather condition, safety, and accessibility​

Comment

Inspiration

HealthBud is an app that is focused on making physical activity more accessible and enjoyable for women*. By connecting women* who share a common goal of exercising, but may face barriers (safety, accessibility, communication) in their way of reaching their health goals, we are working to empower women* and foster community connections.

What it does

HealthBud starts by using a chatbot to intake new members, learning about their unique goals and situations. This includes if you are a woman* recovering from an injury, a new mom, a senior, or a student, or anything in between. Our app considers these parameters as well as location, pre-existing gym memberships, frequency of exercise, and fitness goals to connect you with a fellow HealthBud to empower your workout. You can also reach out to our chat-bot to ask for child-parent accessible trails, well-lit, level venues, along with more.

How we built it

We use android studio for the first time to develop our app, using a combination of Java and XML for our front end. This was a rewarding challenge for our team as none of us had previous app development experience. We also leveraged tools such as Google Firebase, Google Cloud and Google Dialogue Flow, Google Firestore. To build our back end we used Java and Node.Js. We developed a matching algorithm, that we are looking forward to continuing to implement as we gather more data.

Challenges we ran into

It was very difficult to get started with different tools and understanding how the backend and fronted end would be able to communicate within the app. The main challenge was integrating all the different features such as the chatbot, Firebase database access with the backend, and the UI. Dividing up the labour work was also a challenge for our team since none of us had any experience in developing an app before.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We started from scratch, not knowing a single thing about app development and we were able to understand how the different pieces come together to develop a working prototype, including front end, back end, and algorithm. One of the main accomplishments was being able to use Google Cloud cloud computing, Dialogflow chatbot, database management, and authentication system in our app. One of the most rewarding experiences was seeing first-hand the integration between front end and back end, and how they could operate simultaneously.

What we learned

We learned that there is a lot of layers behind any app and software. It is easy to focus on just the components you interact with as a user, and we sometimes tend to ignore the complexity of each implemented layer. Also, one of our main challenges was not writing the code, but was setting up the different infrastructure for the layers and nodes to work coherently together. We are excited to have been able to overcome and grow while facing these challenges as first-time app developers!

What's next for HealthBud

We hope to improve our matching algorithm to be able to match people more effectively, taking into account all different parameters that have an impact on the matching preferences, as described in "How We Built It" . We would like to partner up with city municipalities to be able to foster a community in which women empowerment is furthered through making meaningful connections.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates