iFitness

A single swipe can make it right, change the way you live your life.

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Inspiration

With the increase of gyms being constructed, it has become a societal standard that the path to a healthier lifestyle is through paying for memberships and trainers. While they may be effective, they are exceedingly expensive. The stigma against more traditional workouts methods like jogging and swimming has been on the rise and are being seen as less “effective”.

The inspiration for this project is the concept of community involvement and “peer-to-peer” fitness to increase motivation for living a healthier lifestyle. Using sustainable and cost-efficient methods, we created a system that inspires people to get to know their community members all the while, working out to a better future lifestyle.

What it does

iFitness is an app that matches the users with people in their community that share similar fitness goals. The application uses a “peer to peer” fitness system that motivates users to work out with each other based on their interests, goals, and comfort levels and provides rewards at each milestone reached. These rewards points can be redeemed for healthy food options reinforcing the message and the need for a healthier lifestyle. iFitness also provides users with a cost-efficient means to meet with fellow community members and participate in activities such as yoga in the park, and group morning runs.

We also integrated the usage of a chatbot service that can provide the users with the nutritional facts they desire. The chatbot is conveniently implemented into facebook messenger due to its popularity among all ages of people and its convenient accessibility.

How we built it

The team of 5 consisting of Varun Jain, Shaheer Hassan, Aidan Forsyth, Hafez Issa, and Abdullh Mohamed competed at the 2018 MedHacks Hackathon in Baltimore. The 5 used Adobe XD to create the design and basic functionality for an app that allows users to find fitness partners and fitness events in their area. In addition, Node.js along with several chat and communication-based modules (knex, axios, messenger, etc) was used to successfully create a chatbot that will provide the user with nutritional information as well as a fitness exercises through conversation. In the chatbot, Rasa-NLU was added so that basic phrases from the user would be understood from the bot.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the Hackathon, there were various challenges we ran into especially in regards to brainstorming our idea for the hackathon. Thankfully, we were able to work around our challenges and successfully complete a project. Firstly, the ideas that we brainstormed were very complex and required a high level of programming ability, which none of the members of our team had. In fact, this was the first hackathon for all of our team members and we all either had minimal or no experience with programming. The first idea that we thought of was a blockchain system using SimplyHealth’s KPS system to encrypt patient data. The problems that we encountered from this was storing complex values other than strings and integers. We were able to store a simple value such as Beats per Minute and blood pressure though. We also encountered a variety of debugging issues with our blockchain code. We also encountered issues with our fitness hub idea and this was because we were trying to combine a large variety of modules into one app. Coding the individual modules was not too difficult, but then we attempted the code for the app using Java and that proved to be great difficulty for our team. Through all of the struggles our team encountered, we were able to design our app using Adobe-XD as well as program a working chatbot that could be deployed onto facebook messenger. The last overall challenge that we had was adjusting to the new environment of the hackathon as it was the first hackathon for everyone on our team and we had no idea what to expect initially. We encountered a large number of surprises during this competition and they all had a positive influence on our experience at the conference.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're definitely proud of the consistent accuracy that the chatbot services bring when stating nutrition facts. Not only that, but we are also proud in developing a user-friendly interface in the iFitness app that is fairly easy to use for all demographics. Even though we may not have coded up a fully functional backend to the application, we are proud to have developed a functional and eye-catching front end with little to no coding experience. Last but not least, we are extremely proud of the fact that this is our first hackathon and that we were able to complete a successful project with limited experience.

What we learned

Through our experience at Medhacks Snow 2018, we learned how to manage a team of differently skilled individuals and combine everyone's skills into an interdisciplinary application. Through this, we also gained exposure to programming, design and had the opportunity to network with world-class researches and tech companies. Something that really took a while for us to realize is that hackathons aren’t necessarily entirely digital, but there are other important social, accessibility, and implementation aspects that are crucial to the development of innovations, especially in community health and infrastructure. Most importantly, we learned the importance of making do with what you have in a limited time frame.

What's next for iFitness

Going forth, we’d like to fully integrate a functional backend with a user-profile login system. We’d also like to acquire community partners to offer a wider variety of redeemable awards for our points service. Additionally, we would like to consult with the expertise of nutritionists and personal trainers that can provide valuable input for delivering a more effective service that will improve community health and fitness infrastructure.

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