uOttaWalk

Leaderboard
Authentication

Inspiration

We, as humans, enjoy walking. So much so that it has become a way of life for many. Humans are also prone to the great sin of envy and comparing themselves to others. It is therefore common sense to create a marriage of the two human pastimes and make a leaderboard system of counting steps.

What it does

uOttawalk is an iOS application (eat it Android fanboys) that takes the steps of the user at the end of every week and places them on a leaderboard with contacts who also use the app. The purpose of the leaderboard is to form a new structural hierarchy in the digital space and to create a snapshot of the pedestrian zeitgeist.

How we built it

The front end was built with React Native, using Apple Healthkit SDK to retrieve the phone user's overall steps. The databases for users and weekly step profiles are built with Firestore on Firebase, which will be interacted with using the Node.js backend. We implemented Solace PubSub+'s message broker to communicate with all users of the app. The backend is dockerized and deployed to a VM hosted via DigitalOcean, which the app can interface with.