Re:New

Dashboard Progression

Inspiration

“The hardest part is starting. Once you get that out of the way, you’ll find the rest of the journey much easier.” - Simon Sinek Oftentimes, we become unmotivated and stressed when faced with seemingly unachievable goals. This motivated us to build an interactive mobile app that helps break these goals down into daily doable tasks – all while fostering a motivating community to keep each other accountable. By sending the user daily reminders to complete a task in a category of their choice, we take away the stress of having to take those daunting first steps. In doing so, we are removing the barriers preventing users from fully exploring their interests and evolving beyond the scope of their current self. Re:New provides anybody and everybody with endless possibilities to reimagine a new you.

What it does

Re:New sends the user one notification a day, reminding them to complete a randomized task that is customized towards their specific well-being goals. This includes fitness, wellness, academics, and skill learning. Once they complete the task, they can post a picture to verify their completion, as well as the chance verify the tasks of other users.

How we built it

We began by creating UI/UX designs using Figma. Then, we built the front-end of the mobile application using React Native and Redux for state management. For the back-end, we used Boto3 for AWS S3 for image file storage and AWS DynamoDB for our image metadata database. In addition, we also used the co:here natural language processing API to create AI-generated tasks, based on task categories chosen by the user. To link all of our back-end to the front-end of the mobile application, we used Flask to establish a REST API.

Challenges we ran into

Establishing the REST API and learning Flask
Learning how to upload and retrieve image files of BLOB type to and from the AWS S3 service
Translating some of the UI/UX designs to React Native code
Trying to link the metadata of images from AWS DynamoDB to corresponding images in AWS S3
Linking the back-end code to the front-end code seamlessly

What we learned and accomplished through this process

It was exciting to learn more about performing mentally-relieving tasks to improve mental health while providing users with new opportunities to explore beyond their horizons. In this short timeframe, we’re proud of the various APIs, tools, and frameworks we were able to implement, especially as it was our first time using them. To name a few, this included REST API development with Flask, API testing with Postman, the co:here (NLP) API, AWS S3 image storage, and Figma UI/UX designs.

What's next for Re:New

We envisioned Re:New to be a globally connected app, therefore we are looking to create a more interactive platform to create more opportunity for community-building and social interaction. To help with user customization, we want to be able to provide more personalized task packages that could recommend the next step for users.