bactrack

bactrac logo

Inspiration

The inspiration for the problem of our project came from our own experiences with chronic back pain. Having back pain really sucks joy out of your life– even worse since we’re so young. However, with the saturation of the med-tech market, we didn’t want just another app or training regimen that would take too much brain power out of our busy lives. Moreover, poor posture is a hard subconscious habit to break, and building new habits can be very demotivating. As a solution, we wanted to make a product so easily integrated into people’s life, they would be excited to show it off as a fashion or pop-culture accessory. For our solution, we took much inspiration from contemporary products & culture such as Starface, a popular skincare brand for their fun and functional pimple patches, polka dots, notebook sketches, tattoos, and many more.

What it does

We sought to create a patch that would track posture throughout the day and help build up habits for our longevity. We bring this solution onto a simple wearable temporary patch, that matches your outfit, attaches to the skin and serves as a sleeve for a reusable and removable chip that connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth. This patch will track the curve and incline of your back in 3D space. Notifications are then sent to the user when you have bad posture and recommend easy, follow-along exercises based on the situation. For example, if you have sat at a desk for 8 hours, it may recommend some rehabilitative stretches. On the other hand, if you have been keeping good posture, it may recommend strength-building exercises to encourage your muscles to continue the behavior.

There is also the ability to visualize your posture progress throughout the day, week, and month, allowing those who are curious to access information about themselves. With the understanding that almost everyone struggles with bad posture, we also provide a humorous social aspect to tracking that motivates users to make good posture a fun, conscious cultural practice.

How we built it

We implemented this solution by creating a stand-in for the patch using computer vision to simulate the real-time capturing and analysis of posture, then feeding it into a mobile app. This mobile app was created using React Native and Expo-go, connecting to a FastAPI server via websocket. The UI/UX was ideated and designed based on interviews and brand strategy principles in Figma. AI-generated photography of product packaging mock-ups and campaign photography was made in Midjourney.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was ideating how posture analytics can be turned into action and consistent, sustainable appeal and use, as well as identifying a key group of users that would actually use this product. As a result, we dedicated the majority of our time clarifying the problem, identifying our key users (Gen Z and Millenials), and deliberating on a solution that would best help these people thrive in daily life. We wanted the product to be as user-friendly and novel as possible. As a consequence, another challenge we faced was accurately simulating a proof-of-concept (POC) on how sustainable and usable this solution would be. We iterated through many versions and came to the conclusion (that is now our POC) on a way to sufficiently demonstrate our ideas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of challenging our designer mindset by iterating on different improved versions to solve this problem with tech. Through that process, we were able to put ourselves in our user’s shoes and brainstorm what users would benefit from and what features to avoid. We moved from more medical designs to a fun, fashionable solution that could become the next pop-culture trend.

What we learned

In addition to creating a product we believe will thrive in the wellness, beauty, fashion, or med-tech market, our team learned a lot about time management and prioritization. Due to spending a lot of (necessary) time on the brainstorming process, we were forced to implement our POC in a tighter timeframe than we expected. This reinforced our skills in defining key MVP features, quickly prototyping a solution, and picking up new topics like computer vision.

What's next for bactrack

In the future, we’d love to flesh out the recommendation engine on our server: improving the quality of content by suggesting stretches and exercises that meet the user where they are (tired, energized, etc.). We’re also excited to level up the exercises themselves by doing more research and talking with professionals to make sure we’re offering the most helpful movements. Looking further ahead, we’re interested in creating a more fun and encouraging experience by partnering with celebrities or integrating movement to music to make posture training something people actually look forward to. And finally, we want to start prototyping a wearable patch with a hardware chip, so we can track posture data in real time and do more user research to figure out how we can better iterate our solution.