Inspiration

Taking care of your health is hard. It's a huge grind to keep track of all the things that keep you running at optimal potential, and it's easy to let good health that slip away, allowing bad habits to creep in. If repeated over years and years, these bad habits have the potential to shorten your life-span. We wanted to create a project that helped enable people who've developed these bad habits to get back on track. Merging this premise with State Farm Life Insurance creates an interesting opportunity to provide incentives for people to get healthy.

What it does

The BetterLife challenge is designed for people who have developed bad habits, like smoking or excessive unhealthy food choices. These people would traditionally pay higher rates for life insurance than those considered healthy. It's supposed to be a 365 day program that at-risk users can enroll into in order to lower their life insurance costs. During the program you pair with a care-provider like a general doctor and keep track of 5 major metrics that we decided would be the largest factors pertaining to health. Users have set goals they want to reach by the end of the 365 program, and several benchmarks to hit on their way there that would lower the cost of their life insurance by a certain percentage. To keep track of metrics, users will meet with their paired doctor and send them different measurements through the app for them to approve in order to prevent cheating. Through our app, users have an incentive to get healthy by saving money, and can watch their not only their progress, but the possibilities of the road ahead.

How we built it

The frontend is built in Javascript using React.JS, and the backend utilities like user authentication and the database uses Google Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

There were some interesting errors with Google Firebase, we think because a recent major update which changed a bunch of syntax. We also didn't have time to fully connect everything and flesh out the physician component with Firestore, but it's something that if we had another 12 hours we could have done.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Not all of us have a lot of experience in Web Development, and it's one of our members first hackathons so we're happy we got to release a working product!

What we learned

Things never go as smoothly as you imagine them

What's next for Statefarm BetterLife Challenge

We didn't have time to fully integrate the database, and there's more features we'd like to touch up on. If this were to be a real application offered by State Farm, there would also be actual integration with their system where you'd save actual money.

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