Our Mission
To personalize well-being so that health-conscious decisions are the norm and not the exception.
Inspiration
Dieting apps often advertise that one particular food plan will help everyone meet their weight goals, from losing weight to gaining muscle. However, many are unaware that there are actually three body types -- ectomorphs, mesomorphs, and endomorphs -- to take into account and that each of these body types can react differently to the same diet plan. In order to better keep in mind the needs of each body type and dietary restrictions, we decided to create welBi, an app that allows users to create, share, and review different meal plans.
What it does
welBi provides a platform for its users to create, share, and review different meal plans. Each user has the option to select a lifestyle plan based on their body type, food preferences, activity level, and health goals. As the user base continues to grow, we aim to continue to expand our features beyond just meal plans and into other areas of healthy living as well.
How we built it
We built our app in Android Studio, and stored user information using Google Firebase. To prototype and wire framing during the initial design process, we used Figma. We used GitHub to manage each iteration of our design.
Challenges we ran into
From the get-go, we started this hackathon without a dedicated innovator. One of our members with no prior experience with business strategy and entrepreneurship stepped up to take the challenge, learned a lot about pitching a product, and put together a strong pitch for welBi.
One hurdle we faced early on in the brainstorming process was coming up with a convincing pitch for our original idea. We had considered developing a service to encourage informed recycling from individuals, but ultimately we realized that this idea would be difficult to scale and roll out long term to a large audience. We were able to pivot to welBi, but the transition took away valuable development hours.
Another challenge we encountered was version control due to our hackers using different versions of Android Studio. This led to some outdated dependencies causing merge conflicts, and the debugging process for this was frustrating and delayed the roll out of our minimum viable product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We came up with a platform that truly has the capability to grow, expand, and potentially help many others in their fitness journey.
In terms of technical accomplishments, we are proud that we have a general prototype standing even though we were limited on time. Despite the technical difficulties, the plumbing of the front and back end are successfully done. We also have a working sign in page connected to a FireBase database, which is the first step to many more secure ways of storing information.
What we learned
We learned many skills, from creating a business plan to standing up an app, as many of us took up tasks that we weren't necessarily familiar with. However, with everyone stepping up, we were able to put out a strong product that we believe can truly make a difference.
What's next for welBi
We plan to scale up the platform in three ways. To start off, we would like to make use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in order to better recommend meal plans to users. Users can be recommended meal plans positively rated by others of similar body types and dietary habits.
We would also like to increase the types of recommendations we allow, expanding to other fields such as exercise plans. There are many areas in which personalizing can be beneficial when it comes to fitness goals, and we do not want to stop at just meal plans.
We want to generate ways that people can better understand their body types as well and spread awareness of how each body is different from one another. For instance, we would like to include quizzes that better help one understand their body type and give tips and tricks on how certain diets might be better for certain body types.
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