PawGress

Inspiration

New years resolutions wanted all of us striving for more. However, due to the exposure to the novel university lifestyle and its consequent freedoms it becomes difficult to achieve these goals. Students need a helping hand, well in our case, a helping paw to get them to keep striving.

What it does

This app allows users to enter activities that are in line with the habits they want to achieve or want to remove. Then, it is treated as a to-do list for the user to accomplish throughout the day. What differentiates us from any normal to-do list is that our AI technology can analyze the user's habits, differentiate between good and bad routines, and then provide personalized recommendations to achieve those goals. Along with the technical usability, we decided to gamify the app. With our dynamic progress bar, users not only track their progress but also get to see their fun animated dog avatar evolve as they achieve their goals. It's habit-building made interactive and rewarding.

How we built it

We utilized React Native to ensure cross-platform capabilities and scalability. The Cohere API agent to generates personalized habit advice, provides motivational feedback based on the user's goals and completion progress, and integrates natural language understanding to create intelligent suggestions. We used the Asyncstorge library to save and load habits and advice history locally.

Challenges we ran into

Our group decided to challenge ourselves by attempting to create a React Native application with zero prior experience with that and Javascript. We spent the initial hours of the hackathon actually teaching ourselves which ended up being extremely difficult. Another challenge we ran into was trying connect the backend to the frontend and get our API calls to work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're lucky enough to get a fully functional app that can be used. Initial setup of user friendly interface, successful API integration and information retrieval through Cohere AI, and successfully combining React-based frontend to the Java-based backend.

What we learned

React Native, Cohere API integration, Building an app from scratch, Coding Collaboration, Javascript, Typescript, Time management, Git, Supabase, and Java.

What's next for PawGress

Initially, we planned to create a seamless, online database for user authentication as well as for storing user input activities and AI generated advice using Supabase. However, there were technical issues regarding connecting the database tables as well as syncing the data fetch and data insert functions with our Expo app. As a result, the app would not just become a personal recommendations app but an app that could be used to celebrate one's achievements with a like-minded community. Additionally, we wanted to add another AI feature where when the user inputs an activity, the AI would generate advice and summarize it into a suggested activity that would display on a separate tap called Suggested Habits. Users would then have the option of adding the suggested habits to their own personal habits tab.