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🌿 EcoTherapy Hackathon Project: Eco4Life

Hello! We’re Team TECHnical difficulties, consisting of Benson Zhang, Ryan Lin, Raymond Chen, and Danial Armiyaev. We attend Brooklyn Technical High School. We are addressing the problem for Ecotherapy under the category Health and Wellness. Our project, Eco44Life, helps people overcome isolation by guiding them to nearby parks and gardens, while offering emotional support through our AI, Sarah, to make reconnecting with nature safe and uplifting.

Our Inspiration

We found inspiration for this project through the experiences we’ve faced in our day-to-day lives.

In high school, many students find themselves needing to balance coursework, extracurricular activities, and familial responsibilities. As a result, people can feel burnt out from long hours of work, leading to isolation from the outside world.

With the era of technology on the rise, it's easy to forget our roots: nature. Nature is peaceful, tranquil, and embracing it can be a great form of escaping all the mess and clutter life throws at people. However, a lack of motivation and limited awareness of nearby nature spots are preventing people from connecting with the natural world.

These challenges led to the inspiration for our project: Eco4Life

A therapeutic AI companion that motivates people to step outside, paired with an app and website that display routes to nearby nature-filled areas.

Eco4Life helps people combat loneliness, burnout, and disconnection, slowly guiding them back to the healing power of nature.

What It Does

Eco4Life is a web-based platform designed to help individuals reconnect with nature and their communities through the support of AI and modern mapping technologies.

Our solution offers:

Therapeutic AI Assistant: Sarah:
A therapeutic virtual companion that engages users in meaningful conversations. Sarah provides emotional support when they feel down or lonely and encourages users to take the step to embrace nature for healing.
Nature Route Finder (Google Maps API Integration/react-native-maps):
When the user feels ready, our project can guide them to local nature-rich locations such as parks and community gardens. Users can access a list of nearby outdoor spaces, which makes nature more accessible, even in urban areas.
Groups/Chat: The user can join groups and find events there or chat with people. This is really practical in real life, for example, a user could join a soccer group to know when soccer matches are happening and see how many participants are joining.
Mental Wellness Focus:
The platform is designed to break the cycle of isolation and depression by offering users a safe and supportive environment and a tangible path back to the natural world.
Community Connection:
Beyond just therapy, the site connects users back with their community, giving them a sense of worth and belonging.

By merging mental wellness support with nature accessibility, our platform not only addresses emotional needs but also promotes healing through nature.

How We Built It

Our website is entirely built with Next.js, React, TypeScript, Javascript, and CSS. We utilized Google Maps API for our mapping system and Llama AI for our therapeutic AI Assistant.

Our app uses React Native/Expo, React, TypeScript, Javascript, and CSS. We also created a server (using Bun) to store the groups, events and chats.

We find the user's location by using the Geolocation API in the browser if they allow us access to their location. If access is not granted, we use the IPInfo API, which estimates their latitude and longitude based on their IP address. Then, we use Google's Map API with our API key to calculate a walking route from the user's location to a nature spot, returning the distance, duration, and route path.

Challenges We Ran Into

One of the major challenges we faced during development was the incompatibility between certain React components, particularly when attempting to render server components alongside client components. Integrating server-side rendering with dynamic functionality proved difficult, especially when extracting data from APIs and trying to import specific libraries that were not optimized for server-side execution.

These conflicts often resulted in runtime errors or required significant refactoring to maintain consistency across the application. Balancing the performance benefits of server components with the interactivity of client-side features was a process that demanded a deeper understanding of Next.js rendering methods.

Another major challenge we faced was using Expo. We had to reinstall dependencies many times because of package errors. We also had to figure out how to use packages like react-native-maps and deal with many of the annoyances that come with React like so-called "prop drilling".

Finally, we had to consider how to structure the data in the database because for the hackathon we decided to ignore problems with security and instead make it so clients could modify the database without authentication, but it could be setup relatively quickly if we had more time.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of and What We Learned

One of our proudest accomplishments was gaining hands-on experience with React and learning how to effectively track and use geolocation data in a real-world project. We successfully created both a functional website and an accompanying app that not only look polished but also integrates meaningful features, like our therapeutic AI assistant. This assistant provides users with emotional support and practical suggestions, guiding them toward nature-based destinations.

Bringing together front-end design, API integration, and AI interaction in a seamless user experience was both challenging and rewarding. It gave us valuable insight into building responsive, user-friendly web applications that serve a real purpose and can positively impact people’s lives.

What's Next

Looking ahead, we plan to expand our platform by developing an app to gamify going outside. One feature we plan on implementing is an Achievements page, which will gamify the experience with streak counters and by rewarding users with badges and milestones for active engagement, such as visiting nature spots and chatting with our AI Bot, Sarah. We also aim to enhance the AI assistant’s capabilities with more personalized support and integrate user feedback to refine the platform. Finally, it would be nice if you could follow groups and get notifications for new events and if the chat allowed you to reply to other messages.

Our goal is to continue making nature and mental wellness more accessible, engaging, and impactful for everyone.