Pocket Trainer

Our mission is to motivate and encourage a healthy society with ease and accessibility.

Comment

Inspiration

We wanted to find a way to inspire people to be healthier and stay on track to reach their fitness and/or nutrition goals.

What it does

This app makes people's lives easier. With the needed user's input, this app gives you an estimated calorie intake and tracks your calorie intake throughout the day just by taking a photo of the food, giving you an overview of how many calories you are consuming. It also tracks your exercises and physical activity including the workout completed and calories burned. The app will help you track your progress towards these goals, and once you have reached them, it will send them an encouraging message.

How we built it

Our chosen language was Python, and we used the IDE Visual Studio Code as our programming environment. We started with brainstorming different ideas on programs that would positively impact our uses and the world. We settled on an application that would make trying to stay healthier an easy and more interactive process. We wanted something to do with calories, and saw an opportunity to incorporate AI learning into the process. Calculating calories for a person was simple enough, it was a basic mathematical formula. The AI learning (Lobe) was incorporated into our scanner feature, which scans real world food items and logs the food’s calories against the calculated recommended daily caloric intake. Calculating the calories burned from working out took a bit more time as there are more variables to consider such as age, weight, gender, exercise habits, intensity of the workout, and what type of workout the user is doing. The aerobic exercises found the amount of oxygen consumed to be divided by the amount consumed while resting to get the metabolic equivalent of task and was input into a formula to get the calories burned. The anaerobic exercises took the amount of sets multiplied by the number of repetitions of the weight used to get the amount of calories burned. Tkinter was used for the user interface and openCD was used for the camera.

Challenges we ran into

We had various ideas, to the point where we were overambitious on the features we could implement within our limited amount of time. One of our ideas was scrapped due to our lack of knowledge in the field of memory storage and databases, which is something we are now all determined to learn. For three out of four of our members, this was their first hackathon and large scale programming task. Mentally, it was tough for us to be functioning on low sleep and energy, while also not being the most knowledgeable about many programming aspects.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The most foremost thing that we are proud of is our teamwork and dedication. Every member was important and tried their hardest to ensure this was a positive experience with a resulting product we could be proud of. Our UI is also one of our major accomplishments. Although it looks rough now, it does exactly as we want it to, all in part to our teammate Loc Nguyen, the only person that truly knew how to utilize User Interface. We are also proud of how we were able to incorporate AI learning and Twilio into our programming. Both are integral in the key features of our application.

What we learned

Each team member had their own key takeaway. However, as a group we learned the process behind group based programming, which is extremely valuable as we get deeper and deeper into our fields and start joining the workforce. We had also learned new syntax and ways to implement Python in order to conquer different challenges. Being able to learn and experience Twilio, Tkinter UI, and Lobe Machine Learning are just some of the major skills we walked away with.

Why do we fit into Twilio's creative use?

Twilio's SMS system allows us to send congratulatory messages to our users once they have reached either their caloric or fitness goals, as well as reminding them to set their goals daily. These messages are part of the ways we keep our users motivated, celebrating their accomplishments towards maintaining a healthy lifestyle. In additional, we also use Twilio's functions to create a custom greeting message when the user enters the app based on the time of day.

What's next for Pocket Trainer

As we are all college students, we will most likely return to our daily routines of waking up, going to class, and going to bed. But if the opportunity arises, we will most definitely consider updating Pocket Trainer so that it can fly past the potential it had.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates