HealthyHacker

Inspiration

One huge problem about every student attending a hackathon faces is staring at a screen, sleep deprived, slouching down for over 24 hours. This causes major back pain, eye strain and all the life threatening side effects that come with this. By also sitting at your computer 24/7, you become much less productive by either drowsing off or just not paying as much attention. We created at tool to help solve this.

What it does

 HealthyHacker monitors keystrokes and mouse movements and, depending on the type of person at the computer (developer, designer, or anyone else) analyzes their activity while working and keeps an eye on how long the user is staying in one place. You can think HealthyHacker being similar as the alarm clocks that keep from going off during your deep sleep. HealthyHacker pushes you to take a break by stretching, socializing and relaxing but not during your most productive moments.

How I built it

HealthyHacker is built on top of Github's Electron framework, to provide a hybrid desktop application experience. This allows for faster build times, as developers can develop once and deploy to multiple platforms. Being a hybrid application, HealthyHacker utilizes the popular Angular.js framework along with bootstrap, charts.js, restful web services, parse, and several others.

Challenges I ran into

We ran into multiple challenges building HealthyHacker. Predicting productivity and trying to get accurately predict when a user should take a break, determining accurate and telling levels of productivity and relating those to keyboard inputs and mouse movements. Finally getting the keyboard and mouse inputs were a challenge in themselves

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We managed to overcome just about every challenge we ran into, with little to no previous experience with Electron. Any challenges we were not able to overcome were completely out of our control

What I learned

The usefulness of web development, and the power of hybrid applications, how to function with little sleep and in high pressure situations, and most importantly the value of communication within a team

What's next for HealthyHacker

HealthyHacker has multiple future applications, while it was originally designed for a hackathon-like environment, it can easily be extended to corporate offices, studying and further.