Buddy

Inspiration

Our inspiration from Buddy came from a desire to make fitness and health tracking more engaging, meaningful, and fun in the hopes that it would open up a new wave of people to care about their health and enjoy living a healthier lifestyle.

What it does

Buddy is a cross-platform lifestyle tracking app that features a virtual motivational buddy who represents the users mood and activity. Physical statistics allow the user to track their progress in respect to goals, and to chart these statistics over a week long interval to see how they compare to their goal. Another tab provides a look at some detailed statistics to track the user’s fitness level, as well as charts to plot longer term trends.

How I built it

Buddy was made using Flutter, which connects to a Firebase database to sync and track health-related statistics about the user.

Challenges I ran into

The Buddy team ran into a few issues during the development process. Firebase is very specific about how you access data, so we had difficulty getting single pieces of data to display. There were also configuration issues in the early stages of Buddy that slowed down the development process considerably, some of these issues were bad enough that team members needed to reinstall necessary software and reconfigure.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As a team, the thing we are most proud of is that we've made a piece of software that can make a real-world, positive difference. Buddy has potential to get people more excited about their health, their fitness, and can encourage people to make positive changes in their lives. There is nothing we could be more proud about.

What I learned

Everyone on the team learned lots during the development process. For most of us, it was out first time using Flutter. This was even the first introduction into mobile development for some of us! Working on Buddy taught us all a lot on asynchronous development, Firebase, Flutter, and more generally mobile development as a whole.

What's next for Buddy

There are numerous ways to expand the features and functionality of this Buddy. One option that would be beneficial to add is the option for users to choose their own Buddy, as this would give them more customization options and could increase user engagement within the app. More detailed statistic tracking and google fit integration are also avenues that would be beneficial to explore to increase statistics coverage, accuracy, and convenience to provide the most accurate, convenient, and thorough health analytics possible.

Built With

• dart
• firebase
• flutter