lil' buddy

Helps you with the smaller things in life, to help keep you healthy in the smaller ways of life

Comment

Inspiration

When doing research for the app, we recognised the high demand in health and fitness apps so we decided to look into what was currently available on the app market and how we could provide a better, more useful app for the users. We noticed there were a lot of apps out there which did simple jobs at a very basic level such as water monitoring. We did’t see a point of having single apps that did individual jobs so we decided to merge the functionality of a couple of different apps on the market to produce our solution, an app that helps record and monitor your surroundings so the user doesn't need to

What it does

There are small ways to keep healthy that on a day to day basis we forget to do because its so trivial and we don’t have time. Our app does everything the user does’t want to/ think of doing. Currently our app: - Monitors how much water you’ve drunk and sends you reminders to drink water through the day. If you haven’t drunk enough then it redistributes reminders through the day to insure you drink enough by the end of the day - Monitors the sound levels around you. If you are exposed to a sound of above 100 DB for over 15 minutes it can be damaging to your hearing so the app notifies you that you might want to leave the location soon to prevent any hearing damage - Monitoring the temperature around you and every morning sending you a message telling you the temperature so you’re always aware of what the weather will be like

How we built it

We built lil 'buddy on the iOS platform. Our team consisted of 3 coders, Varun, Aryan and Ferdinand. The jobs were split evenly between the three coders to insure maximum efficiency while working. How the jobs were split up:

  • Varun : Worked on the water monitoring system and designed the user interface
  • Ferdinand: Worked on the DB measuring system
  • Aryan: Worked on the temperature monitoring system

Challenges we ran into

We first started off working on another idea but after 12 hours we realised that it may be too complex to create within 24 hours so we swapped our idea to Lil' Buddy. The main problem we had with Lil’ Buddy was the time constraints. 12 hours to conceptualise, research, design and create the app was a challenge but in the end we managed to create an app which we were all proud off.

Another problem that we faced was with getting the API for the weather monitoring system working effectively. The weather monitoring system was meant to detect UV levels and inform the user based on their skin tone whether they should wear sunscreen or not. Once again because of time constraints we needed to simplify the temperature monitoring system for the contest as there was not enough time to complete the UV monitoring system.

Lastly we struggled with getting push notifications working properly but by the end of the project we managed to get it working smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Through making this app there were a lot of highs and lows but the high points that we were proud of are:

  • being able to finish a working model of the app within half the time as the other contestants
  • effectively using team work and leadership skills to work efficiently without any scats or arguments
  • producing a professional looking product with a minimalistic user interface
  • improving our coding skills in swift

What we learned

Each member in our team had a different outtake from this hackathon:

  • Aryan learned how to use public API's to get data from the internet and some auto layout and learned how important maths is in the field of computer science
  • Ferdinand learned how to make calculation's in code and how to create circular progress view's in iOS
  • Varun did’t have much experience coding in Swift before as his primary language was Java hence this hackathon gave him the optimal conditions to improve his skills in Swift

What's next for Little Buddy

The possibilities for Lil’ Buddy are nearly endless. There are many ways we can expand this app such as including new modules to help out with more sides of health monitoring, continuing to make the user interface more understandable and efficient to improve the experience of the end user and working on our existing modules to help refine them and make them as beneficial to the end user as possible. Right now our focus is on improving our app but I am very excited to see where we can take Lil’ buddy in the future.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates