Plog-In

Inspiration

These days, you can easily run into people running. About 50 million Americans (or 15 percent of the U.S. population) participate in some form of running or jogging, according to a 2020 report from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Moreover, another statistic shows a 65% increase in running and jogging activities during 2020. We noticed this and focused on how we could use those interests of people in a meaningful activity. Then, 'plogging' came up to our minds. Plogging is a combination of words, 'plocka upp' which in Swedish means picking up, and 'jogging'. As it can be easily inferred from its name, plogging is picking up trashes while jogging or running. Through this, people can not only pursue their goal to be healthy to fulfill their achivement, but also gain another motivation to save the earth and be more green.

What it does

The service that Plog-In provides is focused on one's individual activity. Basically, it involves two parties, an individual who runs and collects trash, and the checkpoint/station(store) which will weigh and help individuals record their activities.

First, it can collect the data a user creates during his/her activity - such as distances, weights of the trash being collected during the run, and the duration of the run. One can pause anytime during the activity, and while it is paused, the duration and the time will not change. If one decides to stop the run, the application will automatically save the activity, and will show a QR code.

Then, the user can scan the QR code at the checkpoint/station to keep their record. Each checkpoint/station will have rankings of up to five, and the users will be displayed on the application page. Through the ranking feature, people stopping by the checkpoint/station can check the other's records and compete with them.

Lastly, one can see the activity history on the user profile page. It will be shown in a heatmap-styled graph in the perspectives of weight and distance. The colors will be more vivid as the numbers increase, which is expected to provide extra motivation to the user.

How we built it

We planned to build a web application, so the team was divided into two: Front-end and Back-end. Since our application required much more work on the Front-end part, we had three people for Front-end and only one for Back-end. The tech stacks used for this project are React and Firebase for front-end, and Python and MongoDB supported with Fast API for back-end.

[Tech Stacks]

Front End

React
Firebase

Back End

Python
MongoDB
FastAPI

** Note that we only implemented mobile version (apt for iPhone 12 pro), so highly recommend to view in with Mobile/mobile size screen

Challenges we ran into

While we were implementing our features, we learned that some documentations were not up-to-date, which took us several hours to notice. One of that was a Marker on Google Map, where the documentation said but the actual classname was .

Also, another challenge was a technical issue. To allow three front-end guys to develop and share the process at once, we used Visual Studio's 'Live Share'. Being able to share the code without having to access the github repository (and any extra pulls and pushes) was very convenient, but on the other hand, we all shared the errors as well. This implied that when one was coding and had errors, the others would not be able to do their part as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The coordinate of user will be collected every 10 seconds as a format of longitude and latitude, and the distance traveled during that 10 seconds will be added up to calculate the cumulative distance for the activity. This feature included numerous APIs such as Google Maps and Geolocation. This is the real-time application which

What we learned

There are 4 thing what we learned from the project.

How to communicate with other teammate,
How to Plan and organize work properly,
The Importance of testing and debugging.
Democratic Idea sharing We discuss a lot of idea and spend a lot of time to select and consider what idea will be proper for the hackaton, We decided the idea with democratic way with deep understanding of the idea.

What's next for Plog-In

There were so many features that we tried to implement but could not due to the lack of time.

The future implement-able features for users are as of below :

Report the areas with litter while jogging
When the number of reports on a specific region reaches up to a number(estimation : 10), the 'trash monster' will pop up. (One can catch the monster by stopping by the nearest checkpoint/station)
The trash monster caught by the user will be stored in the user's badge collection(similar to pokedex)

The future implement-able features for stores are as of below :

exchange the trash collected with the 'points' a user can use for buying eco-friendly products
Installing actual checkpoints/stations near the campus (If there are no possible checkpoints/stations near by, it can be replaced with a vending machine)