Savor

Improve your well-being by eating more mindfully

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Inspiration

I first learned about mindful eating at a class, and I've tried to practice it myself ever since. I really believe that eating mindfully has health benefits, saves money, leads to better well-being, and has other very positive effects. I have done a bit of background reading on mindful eating before the hackathon, but everything else was made this weekend!

What it does

My app encourages people to eat mindfully, reflect on their experiences eating mindfully, learn more about it, and look back on how much they've grown with the habit and how it has improved their lives.

It does this through having a screen of slowly scrolling questions and reminders related to mindful eating that people can look at while eating (instead of playing games, watching videos, or scrolling through social media). Once someone is done with their meal they are prompted to reflect and write about their eating experience and give the experience a rating. Users can go back and look at previous reflection entries via a calendar interface. They can also learn more about mindful eating, and they can set notification preferences to get reminders to eat at times they set. These notifications can be toggled on or off.

How I built it

I built this app using Flutter in Android Studio, with the help of lots of tutorials and sample code.

Challenges I ran into

I am very new to app development, and I ran into so many issues with just getting the example Flutter app to run on my phone. After that, it was really difficult to figure out the patterns of a new language. Thankfully, there are a lot of examples and extensive documentation on Flutter online. I had a lot of difficulty getting UI elements to line up and look the way I wanted. I had trouble figuring out how to use state. I also ran into a really mysterious issue with my icons showing up as different icons. I ran out of time and wasn't able to figure out how to pass data between widgets of get states to persist.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

First of all I'm proud of myself for finishing my first ever hackathon project! I'm also proud of myself for taking the time to learn a completely new language and on a platform I'm not as familiar with (mobile vs. web). I surprised myself with how much I was actually able to get done in the short amount of time.

What I learned

I learned how to build responsive widgets in Flutter and use several different Flutter packages, as well as how to develop for and test mobile in real time.

What's next for Savor: Eat Mindfully

If I had more time I would first try to pass data between widgets and persist state (for example, to save notification prefernces). Then would implement a backend to save journal entries and. Then I would implement actual notifications.

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