Track60

Inspiration

Sometimes people use their headphone/earbuds for too long. In many cases, the volume of the music is too high. Researchers recommend applying the 60/60 rule. The rule suggests listening to an iPhone with earbuds or headphone for 60 minutes at 60 percent of max volume and then taking a break. Ears that get a rest have time to recover and are less likely to be damaged, so we come up with an app to reinforce this rule.

What it does

First, it fulfills all the requirements of a music player. Moreover, it keeps track of how much time you have listened to the music consecutively since you plugged in your earphone. It will send you a notification after 60 minutes (you can customize this value in the settings tab). It also keeps track of the volume. If the volume goes above 60%, another notification will be sent. We also build some visualization to visualize user's usage such as user's daily earphone usage, average music session length as well as average volume.

How we built it

We first built a music player from scratch. Then we need to implement listeners to check whether user changes the volume or plugs their earphones in. We need to record the data accordingly and send notification when needed. Lastly, we need to build visualization to present the past data.

Challenges we ran into

We originally try to build a app that runs in the background that are able to track all other apps that use audio. However, after many hours of hard work, we find that Apple doesn't seem to support such a feature. So we have to build a music player within the app.

What I learned

We need to figure out the feasibility of the feature before we dive into it.

What's next for Track60

Currently, we can only play local music. We can incorporate APIs like Spotify to include more sources of music and deal with copyright issue in the future. Besides that, we can also improve our visualization for users to understand their music usage.