Inspiration
As a team of students that will soon be entering the workforce, we find that balancing work with healthy lifestyle choices can be challenging. In particular, working at your desk for hours at a time can take a toll on your eyesight, muscles, bones and brain! Therefore, we decided to work on a solution which we call UTime.
What it does
UTime is a mobile application focused on addressing physical health problems such as eye strain and back pain, emotional burnouts and loss of productivity. UTime can tell users how many breaks you should take based on the hours you are about to work (Calculator in back-end). During the break, guided meditation, an exercise, calming music and calming sounds are all offered in order to give the user a break from staring at their computers and to adjust their posture. For free users, they get a limited library of break options, while premium users get a larger bank of exercises, music, sounds and meditation options along with exclusive rewards. Moreover, we treat each user as a unique individual while comparing them and tying them together with the local and global community through an incentive system and leaderboards. Through the implementation of this social system, the user is focused on not only competing against themselves but competing with others, each trying to improve their work-health balance. With shared user experience and efforts of achieving a healthier lifestyle, individuals are made to not feel alone in their working sessions. Our incentive system is unique in offering discounts for users to redeem through their points acquired by their accumulation of checkmarks for items that follow themes of health, wellness and productivity.
How we built it
The language that will be used to build the application is Dart. The front end of the application will be built using Flutter, a multi-platform SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows for the building of the application for both iOS and Android using a single codebase using Dart. The backend of the application will be built using Firebase, a BaaS (Backend as a Service) from Google that can be integrated with Flutter to implement the backend with minimal code maintenance.
Challenges we ran into
The initial challenge that we were faced with was the ambiguity of information related to cost and revenue projections. In order for us to explain our app's feasibility, we had to conduct extensive research on software companies, app store costs, commissions on sales and much more. Although challenging, we focused on making justifiable assumptions that proved to be similar to our closest competitors, while considering our newly founded presence in the productivity/health and wellness field.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a team, we are proud that we were able to utilize our strengths in order to work efficiently in the development of UTime. With the limited time allotted, we were impressed and proud of the idea in general and the fact that we had to come up with this idea from scratch.
What we learned
Throughout the progression of the development, we learnt that research is crucial in the evaluation of whether the idea is feasible or not. Without determining feasibility, although a great product, it could fail by factors such as not targeting the right people, or not promoting on the proper channels to reach the target market.
What's next for UTime
Once credibility has been established, UTime plans on expanding directly into larger firms by offering promotional deals such as free one-year subscriptions that could lead to partnerships. Furthermore, updating and increasing current libraries of break options would allow for UTime to expand towards new demographics such as students and offer deals catered to their lifestyles/interests.
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