Hygiene.io

Inspiration

As people who at one point worked with children, we understand the importance of good personal hygiene and the blatant ignorance of some of the youth in our care. WebMD recommends that most parents start bringing up hygiene issues and giving over some responsibility to them as early as age 10. Our app aims to help enforce as well as entice younger children and teenagers to keep up good personal hygiene habits that lead to overall better health. We realized that timely reminders could help enforce good personal as the reminder pushes the child to do the activity (brushing their teeth, taking a shower, etc) and over time, they will begin to do it themselves.

What it does

Our app simplifies the process of teaching good hygiene habits by giving parents access to a trove of knowledge and an automated tool for teaching their children good personal hygiene. By setting reminders to send push notifications to both the child and parent at certain parts of the day, week or month, Hygiene.io helps build good habits towards a cleaner, healthier lifestyle. The app allows parents to monitor the child's habits, easily seeing if their child is not keeping up with their cleaning and encouraging them with helpful tips and recommendations to keep their child healthy. The app also gives the child access to a sprite that they can customize to best suit their preferences. This sprite gives a visual cue to the child about how dirty they are getting based on the number of personal hygiene tasks they have missed or ignored.

How we built it

We built this React web app using a variety of technologies. Our database of choice was using Google Cloud Firestore, a non relational realtime database. We also used Firebase messaging to run and execute our push notifications to the parents and children.

Challenges we ran into

Utilizing a non relational database such as Google Cloud Firestore was a hurdle we had a rough time climbing over. We also took quite a while to get a dynamic sprite that could be edited and customized at will while also keeping it animated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our sprite animation together since none of us had ever had experience working with that sort of thing before the hackathon. The use of many different parts and giving the option to mix and match sprite assets definitely didn't make this easier. We also are really happy about getting push notifications working for our web app on both the parent and child side. We expected these to be the most challenging and time consuming parts of our project and we are super happy about getting these features up and running before the hackathon end.

What we learned

We learned the most while building the features that we were most proud of. We learned how to dynamically create sprites using bits and pieces of a completed sprite to create an animated sprite. We also learned how to do push notifications in a React web app.