Periodt.

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Inspiration

Our society is tuned to a 24-hour hormonal cycle, often ignoring women's monthly hormonal fluctuations. Our tracker follows your menstrual cycle, offering tailored advice on diet, exercise, and lifestyle while keeping your data private. We aim to empower women by recognizing the unique aspects of their cycle, freeing them from the guilt of daily performance variance. We aim to enhance women's lives by highlighting their varying monthly strengths and needs.

What it does

Our project introduces a comprehensive menstrual cycle tracker designed to empower women by syncing with their unique hormonal patterns. It visually represents the menstrual cycle through two intuitive graphics: a circular wheel and a linear timeline; both color-coded to delineate the different phases of the menstrual cycle. Depending on the current phase of a user's cycle, the tracker provides personalized diet, exercise, and lifestyle recommendations to optimize well-being. We want to enable menstruating individuals to harness the female hormonal cycle to their benefit, as our society currently runs on a 24-hour cycle that coincides with the hormonal cycle of men.

Prioritizing user privacy, we store all data locally on the device. This approach addresses security and confidentiality concerns, particularly relevant in the post-Roe v. Wade landscape. Our solution not only offers a tool for women to better understand their hormones and align with their menstrual cycles but also ensures their sensitive information remains secure and private.

How we built it

To build our menstrual cycle tracker, we began with extensive mathematical analysis to accurately calculate women's menstrual cycles. Our market research identified a gap in existing menstruation apps: the need for a more holistic approach to women's health, acknowledging the significant impact of menstrual cycles on daily life.

Leveraging these insights and real-life feedback from our female friends, we utilized iOS development tools to bring our vision to life, creating a deployable Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The application was developed using SwiftUI within Xcode, Apple's integrated development environment, which allowed us to craft a user-friendly interface that seamlessly integrates our research findings and innovative features. This strategic approach enabled us to offer a comprehensive, holistic health tool tailored specifically to the needs of women.

Building on this foundation, our application goes a step further by tracking and calculating the average cycle and period length for each user. It does this by harnessing data on typical variations in women's estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone levels throughout the month. By analyzing these hormonal patterns, our app estimates the approximate duration of each user's menstrual cycle phases. This personalized tracking empowers users with insights into their unique hormonal cycles, facilitating a deeper understanding of their bodies and enabling more informed health and wellness decisions.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered several challenges throughout the hackathon. Initially, we dedicated a significant portion of our time, nearly two-thirds, to brainstorming and refining our project idea. Our initial concept proved to be unfeasible, prompting us to revisit our strategy and develop a new, more viable solution from the ground up. Ultimately, we decided to focus on creating a mobile application to ensure greater accessibility and usability, as opposed to a web application.

This shift in direction required us to quickly adapt and learn Swift, the programming language for iOS app development, a skill none of us had prior experience with. Consequently, the actual development of our project was concentrated into a mere 8 hours of the hackathon.

Despite these challenges, we successfully overcame the initial setbacks and managed to produce a functional prototype within the limited time frame. This experience demonstrated our team's resilience and adaptability, and it has left us optimistic about the future potential of our project. Moving forward, we are committed to further refining and developing our application. This hackathon has left us hopeful for how we can further develop this project and push it to development in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of our proudest achievements is the development of a unique solution for storing user data locally on their devices, thereby bypassing the need to upload sensitive information to the cloud. This approach directly addresses privacy and security concerns, making our app a safer choice for users. Equally significant is our accomplishment in creating a period tracker that is both conceived and tailored by women. Our app transcends traditional period tracking by offering support for the dynamic physical and emotional needs of women throughout their menstrual cycle, embodying a truly holistic health tool. Moreover, the rapid development of our product within the condensed timeline of a hackathon is a testament to our team's efficiency, creativity, and technical prowess. This swift execution from concept to prototype not only underscores our capability but also our passion for the project. Additionally, the hackathon served as a catalyst for team bonding. Despite initial unfamiliarity among some members, we emerged as a cohesive unit, united by a common goal. This project was not just about building an app; it was an opportunity to forge new connections and strengthen our collaborative skills, laying the groundwork for future endeavors together.

What we learned

Through this project, our team gained invaluable insights and knowledge. Notably, our three male developers embarked on a profound learning journey about the female hormonal cycle and the diverse needs women have throughout their menstruation. This experience not only enhanced their understanding of women's health but also played a pivotal role in breaking the taboo surrounding menstruation. Discussing periods became a routine and destigmatized topic among the men in our group, fostering a more inclusive and empathetic team environment.

Additionally, despite being a Computer Science major, our female team lead participated in her first-ever hackathon through this project. This experience was immensely educational, offering her a deeper dive into software development methodologies and the art of efficiently acquiring new software skills on the fly. She (I) learned that Hackathons aren't as scary as they seem.

The project was a practical platform for applying theoretical knowledge and exploring rapid development dynamics and teamwork in a real-world setting.