Apps for Good is a program that works to combine community service and technology. In this project, students are asked to identify community needs and design apps to help mitigate those issues. For this project, I worked with Naga Vikram and Kyle Klamka to create Water You Waiting For.
Motivation + Target Audience
Dehydration is a major health issue that plagues over 75% of people residing in the United States at any given moment. Countless Americans are simply unaware of how much water they should be consuming on a day to day basis. When we were considering target audiences for this project, the first group of people that we were looking at was our elderly population, particularly those with memory issues. We then generalized our project to anyone who might forget to drink water!
Solution
In order to solve this problem, we decided to create a crossover
STEM II and Apps for Good project. We created a smart water bottle
that works with a WWYF app to track users' water intake and help
establish healthy hydration habits.
In order to
define a "successful" project, we defined certain features as part
of our MVP or Minimum Viable Product.
There were
three major criteria that our final application had to have:
1. Provides hydration reminders
2. Connects to the
Smart water bottle
3. Accurately tracks the amount of
water consumed in a day.
Our Process
When we initially began brainstorming, we looked at community
needs. One of the biggest concerns that we thought of was water
source contamination. Many towns have questionable tap water and
water reports often use jargon that is complicated and difficult
to understand. Thus, we wanted to simplify those reports and make
that information accessible to the general public.
As we
started considering the MVP of that project, we realized that with
the time available and the resources at our disposal, it would
make more sense to create a crossover project between our
Stem II project and our Apps for Good project. We decided to make
a smart water bottle that works in conjunction with a mobile
application. The mobile application has a couple major features
like the ability to connect to local Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
devices, enter water consumption information, set personal goals,
and share your daily progress with friends.
App Architecture
This app was coded on the Android Studio IDE, using Java. Any friend activity was stored in Firebase, and the BLE documentation was used for the connection settings.
Final Product
Our final product uses Java on the Android Studio IDE. It has five separate fragment pages that are fully functional, the The app aims to encourage users to maintain a healthy water intake by sending reminders throughout the day at specified intervals and reduce dehydration misinformation by creating a customized water intake goal based on factors like activity levels and weight. The app is designed to be accessible for all users and is currently free. Users are able to share their data with their friends through our Firebase stored friend system. The main features of the app include reminding users to drink water and informing users about water pollution in their area using simple language. The app obtains information from the user and web sources to calculate daily water goals and track water consumption progress. The app also uses location-based information to inform users about water contamination levels in their area, which can be obtained from government websites such as data.gov. The app aims to solve the problem of dehydration and water contamination in an efficient and accessible way.
