Sustainify

Nurturing Sustainable Lifestyles, One Click At A Time.

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Inspiration

  • Given the countless health issues concerning the US and worldwide populations, our project aims to use technology to encourage people to live healthier lives, improve fitness and nutrition, and be happier overall. It all started when one of our parents suggested to make a project that could encourage people to reduce their reliance on driving to school or work while simultaneously improving their fitness and nutrition, all in a sustainable manner. We've designed a comprehensive platform that tracks the carbon emissions saved by avoiding unnecessary driving and provides personalized fitness plans, nutrition guidance, calorie tracking. Users can track their fitness progress through tools like BMI analysis. Our end goal is to help people become sustainably healthier and more environmentally conscious, ultimately reducing their carbon footprint and contributing to a greener, more sustainable world.

What it does

  • Our website aims to provide a space for people to get support for their health and overall well-being. It acts as a hub with various resources including a carbon emission calculator, where users can input the amount of carbon emission they saved with their activity over the week; a calorie calculator where users can find how many calories and macronutrients they need in a day and how to meet them; and a education and resources page where users can find resources to lead them towards their fitness goals.
  • Also, in the workout plans, there are 4 different workout plans: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, and Building Muscle. Users can choose which plan they want to take based on their fitness levels and goals, the desired intensity of their workouts, and how many calories they want to burn. There’s also a “Near Me” page which helps the user find parks and grocery stores near them. And there’s weekly challenges page as well!
  • The Discord Bot has many of the same features as on the web app, but you can access it all in Discord. This helps sustainability because some people might not find our website or might prefer to use Discord more. You can ask for the calorie calculator and tracker, carbon emissions calculator, workout videos, and more! The link to the Discord server with the bot as well as the repl.it page with all the files for the bot are in the try-it-out section below.

How we built it

  • This website was built and hosted by Google Sites, with HTML, CSS, and JS code embedded in it for building select functions like the carbon emissions activity tracker.
  • The logo was made with Turbologo and Adobe Photoshop
  • The Discord Bot was made with Discord Developer Tools and repl.it

Challenges we ran into

  • We originally wanted to make a mobile application with MIT App Inventor or Thunkable, but we realized that its functionality would be really limited given that they mainly use block coding. Therefore, we opted for Google Sites instead, which was a lifesaver for us. It was able to host the website as well as help us quickly format the UI of the website, as well as seamlessly adding and removing new pages. Google Sites also allowed us to embed our own code as well for things such as the weekly carbon emission calculator that couldn’t be simply made with built-in tools!
  • We also wanted to make a login functionality to store user input and for making a login streak, but we realized that it was way outside the scope of a week-long hackathon, and we chose to drop that idea. For any user input that needs to be stored, it is simply stored to localStorage.
  • We wanted to make a Discord Bot using Python, but many of the YouTube videos we found were outdated so that the syntax wasn't valid anymore. We had to spend a lot of time (around 10 hours!) to find out the syntax and then we had to learn to code the Discord Bot. We also didn't know how to store data such as a user's login streak, so we had to research a lot and eventually utilized json files to do this.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The weekly carbon emission calculator was one of the hardest features to make. It took a lot of coding and debugging (around 10 hours as well) to make the calculator correctly take in user input and output the amount of carbon emissions saved and various other stats. We also utilized Charts.js to display a graph of the user’s activity level throughout the week, which also was a pain to get running smoothly.
  • None of us have ever made a Discord bot before, so we were extremely proud that we were able to get one up and running in within a week without any bugs!

What we learned

  • We learned how to implement HTML, CSS, and JS together to make code that can go all the way from taking user input to making calculations and even outputting a graph (most the team had very little experience with these languages and just web development in general)
  • Using tools like Google Sites to act as the blueprint for the UI of our website, and Turbologo to create a brandable name, logo, and favicon for our website.
  • Learned how to create a Discord bot with repl.it and Discord Developer Tools and how to get repl.it to communicate with Discord and have the bot register changes quickly. We learned to utilize json files to store user data.

What's next for Sustainify

  • Continue polishing the Discord Bot so that users can seamlessly invite it into their Discord server. Also, try to make a server-wide leaderboard as well as a global leaderboard for login streaks as well as weekly challenges completed.
  • Login functionality for the web application to make the experience more personalized, such as with rewards for completely weekly challenges, login streaks, and more personalized nutrition and workout plans.
  • Implementing Open AI’s API to create a meal/nutrition assistant that can help give healthy meal ideas based on ingredients that the user currently has in their home.

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