Pendelum

Inspiration

Münchner's lives are full of tasks and projects, and although we presume to be highly organized, technology can bring them great benefits. After researching the digital calendars and schedulers available in the market, we found out that they were all passive tools! We believe that there is a huge opportunity in this digitalized world for a user-friendly software that efficiently schedules the week for you.

We developed an innovative software that using the current technological resources, optimize your time so you can just focus on achieving your goals, bringing finally calm to your life.

What it does

Our intuitive software actively helps you to organize your day, combining your tasks with your preferences and habits to achieve a more balanced and healthy lifestyle.

Multi-modal data is integrated from your favorite calendars (Google, TUMOnline ...), Munich MVG public transportation, Waze traffic, and your to-do lists. Pendelum understands the urgency of each task, its duration, and where it should be performed. Thus, our algorithm suggests to you a personalized day schedule that can be completely adapted and changed to your preferences with a couple of clicks.

Thanks to the MVG public transport information, Pendelum not only takes into consideration your transportation time, but also shows the possible routes, and most importantly, reminds you when to leave so you always arrive on time for your appointments.

Stress feeling is at an all-time high and on the rise, partly caused by the busy lives we lead, trying to do too much and not being able to prioritize. Pendelum helps you to optimize your time and maintain a healthy lifestyle for the long term. We achieve this by balancing your daily working time during the week, preventing work burnouts and improving your mental well-being.

Every time you are using Pendelum, it automatically adapts to your needs and habits, so you receive better suggestions every day. Moreover, just for using the app, you are rewarded with incentives, while you can cooperate with your neighbors and become a City-Hero. As a data cooperative, we manage your transportation data in order to set the basis for better and more sustainable mobility in Munich. Pendelum model lets you decide if you want to be part of the cooperative or if you just want to enjoy the rest of the features. With this business model, your data is not used to make the tech companies richer, but to improve the future of all Münchners.

How we built it

Our philosophy from the beginning has been to make easy things simple, and complex things even easier. This is why integrate as much useful data as we can in our software. Pendelum’s goal is to reach out to all kinds of people living in Munich, that is why we always strived for deploying a highly simplified user interface, while all the complexity is made in the background.

For data integration, we synchronize the user favorite digital calendars (like Google calendar, or TUMOnline calendar) with our schedule, so we can read and clean the useful information to export their events to our algorithm. This step takes less than one minute for the user, and only the first time they use the application. After that, the user uses their calendars as usual, with the addition that their appointments are now used to optimize their time and improve their efficiency.

At the same time, mobility data is collected in real time from the Munich MVG public transportation API, and the Waze traffic API. With these two data sources, we are able to provide the users with different routes and ways of transportation, so that they always arrive on time. Again, these data is cleaned up, and only useful information is provided to the user.

Also, the user can add both fixed appointments or to-do tasks directly in Pendelum in a intuitive and gamified way. The algorithm we built, understands which tasks are more urgent or important, and take them into consideration to display the most convenient day schedule. Thus, the user is also an active partner in the process, which increases their feeling of connection with the application.

Our frontend is a cross-platform application developed in Expo (React Native), making sure that the software is running in any device. In the backend, Pendelum's algorithm collects and processes the data using Python

Challenges we ran into

Building an algorithm that can create a valid schedule for all the activities
Time per API request is long because a lot of real-time data is fetched and returned
Building the mobile app, since none of us has built a mobile app before!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were capable of integrating apps that are typically used by students in Munich while organizing their lives and that our initial prototype is already usable for those interested in starting to plan their day more efficiently.

What we learned

We learned that agreeing on an idea and its features is much harder than the implementation

What's next for Pendelum

We want our app to be able to remind our user via a pop-up notification what time he/she needs to go home and provide a suitable transport connection to get home, given a pre-defined latest arrival time at home by the user
We want our app to ask users if a task has been completed
We want to help users make a plan on how to achieve their long-term goals by splitting the necessary activities into sensible time sessions through a certain time period