Growing up, sports and physical activity was ingrained into our daily routine, whether that simply be gym class at school, or extracurricular sports. Some continue this into college, but the vast majority put aside sports to focus on academics once they enter college. Pushing aside sports, and not having a “gym class” takes away the main forms of exercise. This means that most college students are not prioritizing their physical health. It has been proven that physical health and mental health mutually benefit one another. So, when there is a lack of physical health, mental health declines too. Having a routine, and sticking to it, can help. College is already a stressful time for students: lots of new adjustments, and a constant flow of assignments. The common lack of physical activity adds a burden onto students' mental load. We wanted to lighten that load not only for students, but for everyone, by making a user friendly, community and social focused health app: An app that is not designated for those who are constantly in the gym, but for everyday people looking to engage in more physical activity alongside their friends, and potentially join a new community.
HealthMax enables people to easily track their nutrition and daily activity, and connect with friends, all in the same app. It provides an outlet for joining new health communities and finding events going on near them. Along with the community building, users are encouraged to join leaderboards with their friends, or people in shared communities. This creates low-stakes competitions for the users, which can create a positive feedback loop given that when you do well you are rewarded, and want to keep doing better.
After creating a spec with all of our intended features and simple drafted outline, we began to generate a FIGMA project. During the generation of the FIGMA project, we ensured that the app we created would include all the features that we needed to be successful. Once we had all of our ideas included in the FIGMA project, we began to refine the UI and other visual aspects. Once we were happy with that, we began to build out the backend with Claude. We were able to successfully local host with Docker, and are working on deploying it to Github.
After creating a spec with all of our intended features and simple drafted outline, we began to generate a FIGMA project. During the generation of the FIGMA project, we ensured that the app we created would include all the features that we needed to be successful. Once we had all of our ideas included in the FIGMA project, we began to refine the UI and other visual aspects. Once we were happy with that, we began to build out the backend with Claude. We were able to successfully local host with Docker, and are working on deploying it to Github.
We struggled at first to come up with an idea that fit one of the prompts directly and that we were excited to work on. Once we began to think outside of the box, we came up with Healthmax. Once we began pitching HealthMax to each other in the initial stages, we became genuinely interested in this product and we invested our full attention to creating the best product that we would actually like to use. After multiple hours of design and prototyping, we ran into a wall in production. We began to pitch ideas and improvements slower, and communicated less. In the spirit of building a physical fitness application, we decided to live out our mission and take a break from our design process to get active and spend some time at the gym. We definitely had some problems building out the backend with Claude, but we were able to work through most of them.
We are proud we found a way to better the lives of other college students with a simple solution. We are genuinely be interested in using this application ourselves, and are going to continue working in hopes of publishing a real mobile app. We are proud of the interdisciplinary aspects of our design. We are not used to working on passion projects, often only working on items when classes call for it. This design process brought the three of us together and allowed us to show the best parts of our own education and experiences. We are proud to have worked together on this project and get out of our comfort zones in our respective majors and typical tasks.
We were impressed with the amount of work that FIGMA allowed us to accomplish in such a little amount of time. Thanks to this tool, our UI and design process took a few hours, as opposed to doing it all by hand, which would have taken days of dedicated work and research to accomplish anything similar. We also consulted a Kinesiology student to ask for realistic goals and beneficial movement targets to ensure that what we were doing was based on real academic knowledge, and more than just vibes.
In the future we would like to be able to incorporate more nutritional based tracking for the meals section of the app. There are already apps out there like MyFitnessPal that track macros from each meal, and it would be great to incorporate this into our app that way nutrition and exercise are all in one app. Moving forward, we want to work on many different app integrations. HealthMax would work with your iphone to tracker parameters like steps, phone pickups, bedtime, sleep, and a number of other different data points, and assign, (or deduct), points. We would be able interface with calorie tracking apps, like MyFitnessPal, and you would be able to manage your entire health ecosystem, all with HealthMax
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.