PulseParty

Inspiration

We were inspired by the desire to transform how people approach fitness. Traditional workouts often feel repetitive and uninspiring, causing many to lose motivation. We saw the inherent joy and social energy of dance and wanted to harness that to create a fitness experience that users genuinely look forward to.

What it does

PulseParty is a unique combination of wearable technology and a gamified mobile app that turns dance into a thrilling competition. Users track their heart rate and dance intensity, throw dance parties with friends, battle for the top of the leaderboard.

How we built it

We built PulseParty as a seamless cross-platform experience. Our web frontend leverages the power of NextJS for performant rendering and TailwindCSS for rapid styling. To create a native, responsive mobile experience, we chose Flutter. At the core of PulseParty's real-time functionality lies a FastAPI-powered websocket server, ensuring efficient communication between multiple mobile devices in a session, handling data like heart rate, steps, and calorie calculations. For music hosting we use Spotify Web Playback SDK for their Spotify Player for music handler.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge lay in establishing smooth, real-time data streaming from wearable devices into the Flutter app using the TerraAPI. Balancing efficiency, accuracy, and cross-platform compatibility in this real-time data flow required multiple rounds of optimization.

Another challenge we ran into is that our flutter codebase was not compatible with socket.io for websocket transfer and receiving so instead we rewrote it with FastAPI.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

During the hackathon, we proudly achieved a functional MVP of PulseParty with both web and mobile app, demonstrating its core concept. We efficiently integrated wearable data, smooth session management, and real-time score updates in a limited timeframe.

What we learned

This project deepened our understanding of the complexities involved in real-time data handling. Optimizing websocket communication for low latency and efficient data transfer between a server and multiple Flutter clients proved invaluable experience. The limitations of cross-platform wearable device integrations highlighted the need for adaptable protocols and potential fallback mechanisms. Through PulseParty, we gained practical insights into balancing gamification elements with accurate fitness data representations, pushing us to think critically about algorithm design.

What's next for PulseParty

We're eager to fine-tune our dance intensity algorithm for even greater accuracy and provide meaningful health data analytics to users. We plan to expand PulseParty's social aspect through in-app challenges and explore dance style categories. Future directions include investigating partnerships with health wearables brands and potentially offering tiered subscriptions to unlock premium features.