Compound Steps

Inspiration

I'm a biohacker and love to optimize my health. Yet I don't think the literature is very accessible and certainly not as useful day-to-day as I hoped. I found myself always wondering, am I overdoing it with exercise? Is spending an extra hour walk every day really it worth it for me or is that tiem better spent elsewhere. Well this project empirically and personally answers that question.

What it does

Tells you if it's actually worth it to take time out of your day for an extra walk based on your current level of activity. This takes into consideration the leading scientific literature on the subject, but also you own demographic and lifestyle factors.

How we built it

Research via Perplexity, development via Replit

Challenges we ran into

Developing the core model from the aggregated scientific literature and ensuring that it was not only true to the science, but also practical for the average person was the hardest part of the project. Ensuring statistical rigor and that the app was customizable for each user.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This actually changed my opinion on how much I should be walking. I honestly thought it needed to be way more initially, so this had a positive impact on me. The people at the hackathon that I shared it with were inspired to see what they actually could achieve with small habit adjustments.

What we learned

A monorepo is important to have shared resources between a web an mobile app, so you're not constantly building and updating everything twice. Python doesn't play as nice with typescript like I originally thought. Replit is a lot more capable than I previously realized. Perplexity has a much larger context memory than I realized.

What's next for Walking ROI

Pushing this app to mobile and integrating into apple health will be critical. This will ensure that accurate step data is automatically imported into the app. This is important as it will further improve accuracy and reduce user self-reporting bias. This will allow the app to send the user notifications when they are below or above their peak walking ROI and ensure a healthy and solid lifelong habit is formed.

Built With

• css
• framer
• lucide
• plotly
• pnpm
• react
• tailwind
• typescript
• vite
• world-bank-data
• wouter