iHabit

Inspiration

iHabit is an integrated hardware hack that keeps you accountable for progress towards your long term goals. It takes 30 days to form a habit, so we have created a project that keeps track of how many days you have maintained your new habit in the last 30 days. The phenomenon of ego depletion has shown that it is very difficult to create multiple new habits at a time, so you are only limited to a single habit to focus on at a time when using our device. Lastly, social pressure has been shown to hugely influence our behaviors, and so we have combined habit trackers for four different people, so that you have a social support system in changing your behavior. Everyone's journey is different, so we do not show what you are trying to change about yourself, but instead just maintain a count of days you have maintained your habit as an indicator of consistency.

What it does

Keeps four counters for you and your friends or roommates to keep track of how consistent you have been in making progress towards your goals. A button is provided for each person to log their progress once a day. A log is recorded on an external device of how many consecutive days each person has maintained their habit.

How I built it

We used an Arduino Nano as a microcontroller unit to communicate between buttons and alphanumeric display (HT16K33 Backpack). We used an Advantech RSB-4411 board to keep an external log.

Challenges I ran into

We had difficulty coming up with an initial idea that we thought could be impactful and creative. After we had implemented the basic requirements for the project, we tried to integrate a solar panel into the project, but did not have the required hardware components in order to achieve this.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We finished!

What I learned

We learned how to make use of the I2C communication protocol as well as integrate between an Arduino microcontroller and a small IoT device.

What's next for iHabit

If the IoT device is hooked up to wifi with its Ethernet port and a server is set up, we could use the device to send POST requests with data about each of the counters. The server could utilize a publisher subscriber model with other Arduino nanos, so that other people with the same device could see the progress of these users in addition to their own. This would create an internet of things where people are transparent about progress towards their long term goals and build a community of self-improvement. In addition, the backend server could integrate with a front end website or mobile app that displays the data in visually appealing ways and allows users to track their individual progress over longer periods of time.