Dream Dragon

Inspiration

Dream Dragon Introduction

This project is created for HackKU 2025, made by Kusuma Murthy, Sophia Jacob, and Anna Lin.

Although often overlooked, sleep is integral in maintaing one's health and well-being. According to the National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute, the lack of proper sleep can be one of the leading causes to chronic illnesses, mental stress, and anxiety. In fact, according to Johns Hopkins, dementia, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity and even cancers of the breast, colon, ovaries and prostate can all be aggravated when an individual has extremely poor sleep schedules.

While researching and understanding about how to create consistent sleep habits, doctors often recommended keeping a "sleep diary" to help you keep an average of your sleep and determine your sleep patterns. We found that, although this solution is quite effective in enforcing us to study our sleep, it is very tedious, monotonous, and disengaging to manually have to keep this count. Other wearable devices that can count sleep can be quite expensive, and not available to everyone. Both of these solutions can easily deter beginners who are just starting to learn about their sleep habits.

What it does

Therefore... Introducing Dream Dragon 🐉!! Dream Dragon is the perfect solution to create a healthier life style with sleep (one dragon at a time 😉). With Dream Dragon, users can:

Create a profile and enter in their sleep metrics into their calendar. It is a fully automated process, and is much easier to maintain!
After inputting their sleep hours for a day, users will receive personalized information about their sleep metrics and helpful tips on how to improve their overall lifestyle, powered by Gemini API.
There is also a ChatBot dragon helper named Blaze, who will help the user with any specific inquires they may have.

We also wanted to create this app to make it as engaging for the users to build up their habits. This is why we made a gamified element to our app:

Users begin with a little egg. If they've met their sleep goal 3 times, then the little egg hatches and becomes a dragon avatar.
From there, the dragon can level up into new colors with additional points from meeting their sleep goals.
Based on the sleep points they have acquired, the user can then play a game where they have to hop on dream clouds and jump over stars! They can only play the game for as many points they have.

This helps motivate the user to try to engage more with their sleep and encourage a healthier lifestyle.

How we built it

We built our app using the Flask Python Framework, Gemini API for sleep analysis software, MongoDB atlas for the backend database applications, ChatBase for the ChatBot, HTML-5 Canvas for the UI and game effects, and we all learned how to use JavaScript for creating APIs and the connections.

Challenges we ran into

Although the end-results were quite rewarding, the challenges were many. First, we had a lot of integration issues, especially when trying to integrate our MongoDB back-end to work with functionality on the front-end. We were all very new to UI-design and front-end work, so we faced major challenges in learning how to use JavaScript, HTML, and CSS - especially for the game and pages part. Another issue that we ran into was overloading the server from running the code too much and at the same time. To overcome these issues, we used teamwork to solve through some of the more difficult integration issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were all very new to creating front-end work, and so we were very happy to be able to integrate and make a full-fledged web app with a user-friendly interface, especially since we had not used HTML-5 Canvas like this before. We also were very excited to use our own drawings and creations for the UI (curtesy of Anna's drawings). Our team was proud of using new and advanced tools that we hadn't used before, such as the Gemini API, since we knew we wanted to level up our application with an AI sleep analysis.

What we learned

Sophia: Sophia worked on creating the AI-related tools, like the Gemini API sleep analysis software in our app. This was a completely brand new tool for her, and she learned how to communicate with AI models through code, and how to service these prompt feedback onto websites. She also learned JavaScript during the creation of this app by creating the Calendar Page and its existing functionalities, such as UI-design, saving the days and sleep hours, and displaying the calendar.
Anna: Anna created the full Dragon Game and used and learned HTML-5 Canvas on this project. This was a relatively new tool for her, as well. She also extensively worked with JavaScript to create her functionalities. Anna was also the one to hand-draw all of our dragons and other UI-based drawings for a seamless and beautiful experience for the user. It was her first time using ProCreate to do so.
Kusuma: Kusuma worked on creating the front end and integrating it with the backend and AI. She got to improve her skills and experience with the Flask framework which was very new to her. Additionally it was her first time trying to integrate many components into a website while still trying to maintain a user friendly approach. She had to utilize Flask, javascript, css, and HTML. Through this project development experience Kusuma was able to applier her database knwolegde, and UI experience to elp create a wonderful project.

What's next for Dream Dragon

For the future we hope to improve our website by adding more games to help provide users more variety. Additionally in order to help users stay motivated and help them improve their sleep schedules alongside their peers, we hope to implement a leadership board and also allow users to form groups with their friends and family to help keep track of who has achieved the most sleep. By doing so we hope to motivate users to improve their sleeping cycles as it is the most integral part of one's health!