ReCover

ReCover is an app that helps people cultivate the habit of wearing masks properly through gamifying experience. ReCover leverages right behavior making our communities safer and brings joy to them.

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ReCover

This is a project created by Sandra Pan, Priyam Patel, and Alex Yangjinan Hu in the IvyHacks Competition.

Inspiration

Although we have lived with Covid-19 for nearly a year, people are still not getting used to wearing facemasks properly and regularly. Some people refuse to wear one, or even blame those who ask them to wear one. We want to change the status quo and make a safer community for our world.

What it does

ReCover aims to cultivate the habit of wearing masks properly. It is a non-profit educational app that combines professional instructions and entertainment experience. Registered users can use this app to check the latest news of Covid-19, learn the knowledge about prevention, report local merchants not wearing masks during the open time, design customized masks, and donate masks to underprivileged groups, etc. By doing the right things and good causes, users will receive ReCover virtual points and redeem them for donation, mask DIY tool bags, local merchants coupons, or other rewards.

How I built it

As we are currently living in a world engulfed by COVID-19 pandemic, we want to develop a project that helps reduce the COVID-19 transmission in the population, and wearing masks is recommended by public health institutions as ways to protect the health of the community. To foster people's habit of mask-wearing, we borrowed concepts from the nudging theory in behavioral economics: positive reinforcement as ways to indirectly influence the behavior of people. Through rounds of discussion, we brainstormed and implemented four ideas of positive reinforcement that reward people's mask-wearing behavior:

First, we gamify mask-wearing by developing a virtual reward/punish system that uses ReCover Coins to encourage community-caring behavior. We reward behavior such as wearing masks correctly, reporting incorrect mask-wearing/mask-wearing law violations, learning pertinent knowledge about COVID-19 in the guidelines page. We punish behavior like wearing masks incorrectly and not following public health regulations. In practice, we incorporate convolutional neural networks to detect if a person is wearing a mask correctly.

Second, we introduce the friend circle to create a social proof heuristic and competition. Users in the friend circle section can view how many ReCover Coins their friends have and users who rank first will receive bonus coins.

Third, we want to make our app more fun so we introduce MaskYou section, a function that allows the user to design their own facemasks and post them on MasketPlace. We hope this function can spur users' creativity and provide a platform to showcase users' personalities that alleviate the stigma of mask-wearing.

Fourth, we want our users to have up-to-date information about COVID so we designed Newsfeed that shows recent COVID news and Guideline that show health information from public health institutions.

We designed the user interface of our app on Figma. Check it out: https://www.figma.com/file/ExDIoE2U5zfS49qkHU7m82/ReCover?node-id=0%3A1 View Prototype: https://www.figma.com/proto/ExDIoE2U5zfS49qkHU7m82/ReCover?node-id=41%3A72&scaling=scale-down

Challenges I ran into

One of our members withdrew from the team on the day before the submission. He was the only member who had experience and skillset in app development. The rest of us either have no tech background or are not familiar with app development. Also, this is the first Hackathon for three of us.

Besides, we are located in different places and thus we had to deal with huge time-difference every day. It was common to work alone and checked with each other at a time when everyone was not sleeping.

Three of us decided on the mechanism and the main interface of ReCover within two days. When the only coder left our team, we were concerned about the deliverables and whether we could finish this project. However, we didn't give up. We learned Figma online and other skills on our own quickly. We developed the whole UI of the app from scratch along with the Business Idea and the total plan to launch.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Three of us decided on the mechanism and the main interface of ReCover within two days. When the single coder quote from our team, we were concerned about the deliverables and whether we could finish this project. However, we didn't give up. We learned Frigma online and other skills on our own quickly.

What I learned

As for the hard skill, we learned how to use Frigma and how to build a prototype. Regarding soft skills, we learned how to work in a cross-cultural team and how to navigate in an ambiguous situation.

What's next for ReCover

Instead of finishing the interface design, we'd like to develop the app for ReCover and promote it to the market.

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