Fitness Bubble

Inspiration

Staying committed to your workouts is super hard! Everybody in our team has a love-hate relationship with working out. We all have experienced the surge of motivation that gets us through about a week of fitness until laziness, food, and TV become infinitely more enticing and we give up. Additionally, quarantine exacerbates a sedentary lifestyle for most people. We wanted to develop a solution to motivate users to remain committed to their fitness goals. While we were trying to brainstorm the biggest motivators of today’s generation, we could not overlook the power of social media. People can remain committed to posting random pictures of themselves for hundreds of days in a row, but they can’t remain committed to a workout plan for more than one or two weeks? This needs to change! Fitness Bubble combines social media with fitness to motivate people to reach their workout goals.

What it does

Fitness Bubble allows people to stay active in quarantine by motivating people to workout through streaks. People sign up with a shared group name. Inside the group, every individual must workout every day in order to maintain a streak. If someone fails to exercise on a day, then the whole group streak terminates. The streaks act as a motivation to workout. There are three options on the home screen: workout, view streaks with friends, and log out. When clicking on the workout page, viewers can choose different workouts such as lifting and cardio. Each workout is timed. Clicking on a work out leads to a timer screen where viewers can see how much time is left in the workout. They can pause and unpause the timer. After completing the workout, viewers must take a picture of themselves for accountability to ensure that they actually completed a workout. They can view other users’ pictures of the workouts in the friends page. The friends page also includes the group name in addition to the group’s streak length.

How we built it

We used Sketch to make the design for the app. Using Sketch, we detailed the UI designs. We then used XCode and SwiftUI to build the app from scratch. We integrated some of the app’s functions with Firebase such as authentication, the real time database, and cloud storage.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time using SwiftUI. Since it is a relatively new language, there was not much technical support when we ran into issues. For example, the first issue we ran into was changing the screens. Additionally, integrating Firebase into our project was a challenge because of the Cocoa Pods.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The app works! Integrating firebase into an iOS app was a new experience for all of us, but we managed to get it to work. Also, we especially like the clean UI of the app. Many fitness apps are cluttered with irrelevant stats that are confusing and ruin the user experience. However, our UI provides an easy-to-use interface that appeals to many users.

What we learned

We learned SwiftUI in less than 24 hours. How to integrate Firebase into Swift-based apps. Also, using the Materials Design guide by Google, we learned a lot about making clean UIs and user interfaces.

What's next for Fitness Bubble

We hope to integrate a maps API to track distance and elevation covered during running, jogging, or biking workouts. Other features we hope to incorporate are more groups to join, and individual streaks.