Unplugged

Inspiration

Today, worldwide, the average person spends a total of 6 hours and 57 minutes looking at a screen each day and this number will only continue to rise as our lives become increasingly interconnected with the digital space. With this phenomena, issues such as obesity, sleep problems, chronic neck and back problems, depression, anxiety and myopia become common problems that plague our world today. We wanted to create something that can reduce the average screen time of users and hopefully its related impacts. We want the world to find time to get off their screens and experience the natural world as we know it.

What it does

Unplugged monitors the screen time of users across all their linked-devices and awards points for how much time their screens are off (more points for lower screen time!). Users invite friends to join a customized league and compete to attain the most points weekly! Aside from lowering their screen time itself, users can also gain points by hanging out with other users in the league offline to gain more points.

How we built it

We envision that the Unplugged App would be built using the Swift/React Programming Language while utilizing Apples’ Screen Time API to monitor the screen time. For this submission created the mock-up of how the app would look like.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge about building Unplugged was that we needed to know how to code in Swift/React. As a group who is relatively new to this field, we decided that we should focus on our idea itself rather than the technical implementation of the App. Hence, we decided to go with a mock-up of the App.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to put across our idea in a no-code manner. I feel that taking away the coding helps a lot in bringing the focus to the impact of our idea itself.

What we learned

We learnt that while the technical ability for a hackathon is important, the hack idea and how we bring across its desired impacts is equally important.

What's next for Unplugged

With enough support for this idea, we hope to code out the full implementation of the app and do a trial run with a small group of users. The end goal is to publish this on the App Store for users all over the world to use with the aim of lowering the global average screen time in a fun way!