🧠 studyBetter — Pulse Hackathon 1st Place Winner

Every day, we lose one of our most valuable resources — attention.

Students often sit down to study for three hours, but by the end of the session, only a fraction of that time was actually spent learning. The rest is lost to distractions like social media, task-switching, idle time, or constantly jumping between tabs — and the worst part is, we don’t even realize it’s happening.

Unlike electricity or water, there are currently no systems that measure how efficiently we’re using our cognitive time while studying.

So we built studyBetter.

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🚀 What is studyBetter?

studyBetter is a Chrome Extension + Analytics Dashboard that treats focus as a measurable resource — similar to how modern systems monitor CPU utilization or memory usage.

Instead of optimizing how long you study, studyBetter helps optimize how well you study.

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📊 Features

When a user starts a study session, our extension begins tracking:

• Active tab usage
• Time spent on academic vs distracting domains
• Task-switching behavior
• Idle periods
• Micro-distractions (e.g. checking Instagram for 30 seconds)

Users can also mark important tabs (like lecture slides or documentation), allowing the system to distinguish between:

• Productive context switching
• Disruptive attention loss

Using this behavioral data, studyBetter calculates a Focus Score that reflects how effectively someone used their study time.

So instead of saying:

"I studied for 3 hours."

Users can now see:

"I studied for 3 hours, but only 1.9 hours were actually effective."

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⚡ Real-Time Intervention

If a distracting site is opened during an active study session:

Soft Mode

Introduces a short delay before allowing access, encouraging reflection.

Hard Mode

Redirects the user to a Deep Study page to help maintain focus.

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📈 Analytics Dashboard

All session data is synced to a web dashboard where users can view:

• Daily and weekly focus trends
• Effective vs distracting time
• Productivity heatmaps
• Task-switching behavior
• Correlations between effective study time and academic performance

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🔥 Burnout Detection

studyBetter computes a Burnout Score based on:

• Declining focus trends
• Late-night study sessions
• Low efficiency ratios

This helps students recognize when pushing harder may actually be counterproductive.

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🎯 Our Goal

By identifying where attention is being lost and providing measurable feedback, studyBetter helps conserve a critical, invisible resource — focus — turning passive study time into intentional, effective work.

How to use Extension

1. Open chrome://extensions/ → Developer mode → Load unpacked → select the extension folder.
2. In the popup, set Dashboard URL to your dashboard (e.g. http://localhost:3000 when running locally).
3. Start/stop sessions; when you Stop Session, data is POSTed to the dashboard.

Dashboard (no login)

1. From dashboard/: run npm install then npm run dev.
2. Open http://localhost:3000. You go straight to the dashboard (no login).
3. Sessions are stored in dashboard/data/sessions.json. The extension syncs to POST /api/sync-session.

Note: File storage works when running locally. On Vercel (or other serverless hosts), the filesystem is not persistent, so data would not survive between requests

FUTURE MODIFICATIONS

For this single-user, no-login test concept: no currently the dashboard uses a local JSON file and does not need Supabase or any external database. But we plan on implementing multi-user/ hosted deployment with persistent data.