Walk2Feed

With each step, gain Yum Tokens to feed your pet and keep them alive. Your steps, their smile.

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Inspiration

With technology evolving everyday, humans become lazier and lazier, glued to their chairs and bed scrolling on their phone or playing video games. This causes society to become inactive as a whole and become unfit. We wanted to create an app that would motivate people into doing some sort of physical activity everyday.

What it does

Our app tracks the amount of steps the user has each day from their health app and converts it into Yum Tokens. These Yum Tokens can be used to purchase food and feed the pet of their choosing. These pets act as emotional motivation for users to get up and walk around. The emotional incentive is that if the pet is not fed after a certain amount of time, it will die. Additionally, we implemented a Claude AI chat box that takes your weight and height and gives feedback on your step count goal for the day.

How we built it

We built this using a react native app with expo. The program runs on expo go and we used expo sensors for getting the step counts. For building our backend, we used a node express server to receive our step data and expose it. To show our pet, we made a separate app screen that displayed current steps from expo sensors, the hunger bar, tokens, and the food store. We loaded and saved our pets/hunger-level using async storage so that the pet data saves on app restarts. For creating audio, we downloaded Fish Audio AI's clips using their free tokens, and created unique sound effects for each pet when the user clicked on them.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was getting strong enough wifi so that our expo app can connect to the server on our computer and iPhones. Another big challenge we faced was workflow, where merge conflicts became a major issue and had us working for hours to fix it. Getting the Claude AI API key to work was also an issue because it was not compatible at first with some of our devices, and caused many errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to work through our challenges and solve our merge conflicts, despite it being super frustrating to deal with, was definitely a notable accomplishment. We are also very proud of being able to create a working app, even though most of our group consists of first timers.

What we learned

Prior to this hackathon, we have not had any experience deploying or creating mobile apps before, so we are glad to have had this opportunity to experiment with app deployment. We were having connectivity issues while implementing Claude AI, so we also had to learn how to wire the app to talk to our own Node/Express server through Wi-Fi. Having a team with little hackathon experience, workflow was something we also had to learn and experiment with, as previously mentioned.

What's next for Walk2Feed

We were thinking of adding more personalization of pet to encourage stronger emotional connection. Some other potential ideas include adding reminder notifications, home screen widgets, and adding more to the shop by implementing other status bars (hygiene, health, etc.).

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