connectHer

ConnectHer allows pregnant women who may be experiencing uncertainty with physical activity are given personalized workout videos based on their daily symptoms, energy levels, and moods.

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Inspiration

We dedicated time on Friday evening to brainstorm ideas and pitched two ideas to vote on: a visual tool to help children with speaking disabilities communicate with doctors or a project directly focused on women’s health and pregnancy. We voted to implement the visual communication tool as of Friday night. Yet, many of us realized our technical skills for a visual-based product and knowledge base on children’s speaking disabilities prevented a successful, feasible project. By Saturday morning, we went with our instinct and switched gears to start developing a tool catered to pregnant women, which is something we all originally hoped for!

What it does

Today, there is a direct issue where pregnant women face heavy stigma around fitness and being active in early pregnancy in fear of hurting themselves or their child. Our web application reassures this uncertainty by encouraging pregnant women to stay active through recommending workout exercises personalized by their day-to-day energy levels, symptoms, and moods.

How we built it

We discussed potential features to implement, such as our workout recommender powered by GeminiAPI and a geographical database to find doctors in the users’ area. We directed our focus on just one feature, which is the recommender for a type of workout personalized towards what the user wishes for. We carefully chose a list of around 40 workouts that include HIIT, pilates, upper body, lower body, cardio, and more, so that each workout can be tailored towards each user’s wishes.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the process, our backend team members faced challenges with creating PostgreSQL enums for symptoms, moods, and workout types, and making sure these matched with the database, backend validation, and frontend forms. Additionally, our team used Auth0 for authentication while the backend expected users in Supabase's auth.users table, so the backend team had obstacles while debugging foreign key constraint errors—at the end, we implemented a workaround by hardcoding a test user ID for the demo. For frontend members, obstacles included learning React, frontend-backend integration, and learning how to debug errors never seen before. Additionally, general challenged faced by all members included using git appropriately with several people working on the same project at once, which was a challenge slowly resolved overtime by learning when to use basic commands and how to fix lost code or merge conflicts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of developing the full web application! We all are happy of how it turned out and are proud of a working product itself. Additionally, we are all proud that we were able to figure out things such as frontend-backend integration issues, migration issues, and increasing our knowledge of Git. Many of us are first-time hackers and even our first time making a full-stack application.

We are proud of successfully targeting our goal of helping pregnant women, specifically in the highly under-researched topic of pregnancy fitness that needs to be normalized further. We are driven by our "for women by women" motto!

What we learned

This weekend, we learned how to maintain frontend-backend integration while avoiding merge conflicts, how to implement Google Gemini’s API into our backend as the foundation of our with our personalized workout suggestion system, and how to split work among teams when building a full-stack web application.

We also learned how to collaborate using strong communication by advocating for our concerns and issues when unaligned. Many of us had limited developing experience and learned basics of Git, what GitHub is, and standard practices around them.

What's next for connectHer

Our application has potential for several new features that would align with our goals to help pregnant women. We plan to implement a public forum with conversation threads where women in early pregnancy can find a comfortable and safe community and discuss their experiences with one another. Additionally, we can add several in-app features such as the ability to favorite a workout video, increase the database of videos available, share videos with other users, and more. We are excited to explore the potential of ConnectHer!

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