Inspiration
The injunctive message is there: "Save energy", but the more important descriptive messaging is not. Nobody sees a poster and decides that a change to their lifestyle is necessary. However, as humans, we are affected more by social factors. The phrase "monkey see monkey do" is very much real. The phenomenon of social apps that encourage users to partake in certain actions consistently and regularly like setlog and YPT show that peer pressure and social influence is great at getting people to make changes that they otherwise would not. We intend for users to willingly sign up to connect with friends, and are encouraged to take action by their fellow peers.
What it does
We have created a B to C solution that aims to solve the behavioral problem of users. People have lifestyles that they are generally not going to abandon after seeing some pro-energy conservation PSA. This app aims to give users a source of social pressure in the form of subliminal social messaging. This app does this with two approaches. Firstly, a leaderboard that compares household per pax and individual room per pax electricity usage in kilowatt hour by year, month, or day. Secondly, users are able to "ping" individuals under their household in different rooms. This encourages a healthy sense of competition that works off the natural human desire to be morally superior
How we built it
We used Typescript as our main language for the web app. We used MongoDB for the database, Express.js for the backend, React for the frontend, and Node.js to power our server. As for the Android App, Kotlin was exclusively used to create the mobile app.
Challenges we ran into
Powering the notification system of the android app. Since this app was too small to warrant using Firebase for instant time notifications, we decided that for this hackathon, a simple MongoDB long polling strategy would be more appropriate. That means pinging the database at a constant interval to check for any notification requests.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The integration of an external Android application into an otherwise ordinary web application.
What we learned
We have learnt the structure and standard practice of creating web apps. Furthermore, we learnt how to integrate different things such as a web app and an Android app together using a cohesive API call structure that points to a single point of truth (the MongoDB database).
What's next for Novus Actus Interveniens
We intend to integrate smart electricity measurement hardware into our application logic (seeded database values used for now). Additionally, we intend to create an application for Apple and to allow for location tracking of individual households. With sponsors on board, we could more effectively push out a stronger incentive for users to use the app and change their habits from the source.
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