Mindful Minutes

Inspiration

In our current day and age, it's far too easy to lose track of time behind a screen. During a day of productive coding, constant meetings, checking emails or even just bingeing videos, we often get lost in our devices and sadly neglect ourselves by forgetting even the simplest things. Mindful Minutes aims to help remind ourselves to make time to take care of our minds and bodies by making sure we take the breaks and exercise we need to stay healthy.

We were inspired to create a screen tracking app that assisted frequent computer users who spend extended periods of time using the computer. As persistent users of computers we found that after prolonged use we would experience neck and back pain. As young professionals we were told to take frequent breaks and take care of our body but we often find ourselves lost in our work. Resulting in chronic neck and back pain as we continue to ignore our bodily needs. Hence we were inspired to create an application that not only reminds us to take breaks but provides exercises for us to do during those breaks which encourages users to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

What it does

Our website tracks the screentime of users, where after 3 hours they are given a notification telling them to take a long break and do some physical activity, with suggestions of areas to go and do said activities. There are also reminders every 30 mintues to get-up and stretch or drink water. The reminders themselves are hard to miss as the user is notified by a notification on the desktop and by an audible ping. Weather data is also there for the user's convenience and to gauge what activities are feasible given the conditions. Users are also able to change how long the screen-timer is, allowing the to define when they want breaks.

How we built it

We used HTML and CSS as the main front end programming language to display our application. Used in build javascript functions like set interval and clear interval which allowed for the creation of the timer which allowed us to send user notifications when the timer was completed. The notification included giving stretching and water drinking suggestions. In the pop up notification we had included exercise description and images to enhance usability and increase the friendliness of the app to a wide demographic. To further engage with users we have added a weather widget and used a weather api to gather weather information which would then be used to give users suggestions for activities based on the current weather. For example if it was raining outside the application would suggest indoors activities and if it was good weather it would suggest more outdoors type of activities.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few challenges throughout the development of this web application. The first was our poor planning, although we had a general idea of what we wanted to do our scope wasn't narrow enough and our ideas for the website continued to change, even up to the deadline. This made it difficult to present a completed project that met our original vision. Furthermore, the individual schedules of members meant that not everyone was able to contribute as much work as was expected, continuing to hinder our progress. Our biggest challenge however, was our lack of knowledge when it came to the use of APIs, especially with what was available to us. We under-utilised our resources and as such this didn't have a positive effect on the final development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Regardless of the challenges we faced, our team is proud of the work that we were able to do in these 48 hours of development. Learning to create an electron desktop app was one we were most proud of, even if we didn't end up using it for the final application.

What we learned

We had all learnt a lot about time management, task allocation, filming and design UIs. Furthermore, we had discovered with the help of our mentor that we could use electrons to transform our web application to a desktop one. Although in the end we did not use electron it was a good learning experience. Further, the use of APIs and accessing data through these means was a powerful tool, which will be utilised in future development.

What's next for Mindful Minutes

Our implementation of the website wasn't perfect and there are many things that can be done to improve it. The main one being having a live map, as opposed to a static map, allowing users to see the places suggested by the site. This improvement will also focus on the suggested places, which would ideally suggest a place and an activity to do. Also having more health tips, to promote a more healthy lifestyle for users.