When discussing simple habits for good health, the same tropes pop up often, drink water, eat healthy and sleep often. Simple things that seem to be the trinity of good health. However, when we brought this idea up in our team, we realized exactly none of us follow this simple health saving advice. We realized, there is no accountability or easy system of reward for a person to follow through with simple life saving measures. With LYFE, we created a simple interactive health and self-help application to provide users with an easy system to track their progress on simple health goals, while also saving users money on their life insurance policies. One of the applications that served as an inspiration to our project is Safe2Save, an application that rewards good driving behaviors with coupons at restaurants and services in Texas.
LYFE is an interactive health and self-help app designed to save the user money on life insurance. LYFE rewards users for completing health tasks
each day. These health tasks encompass the triad of basic self-health, drinking water, eating healthy, and sleeping well. Each task a user completes
that falls under a healthy parameter for the user grants them experience points, and gold coins. The experience points go towards a leveling system
that the user can use to customize their profile, and serves as a way of rewarding longevity of usage. Gold coins however go towards life
insurance savings. The user can purchase discounts on their life insurance with the gold, at rates that the provider can set.
We built our platform on the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, ReactJS and Node.JS). This stack utilizes MongoDB as our database, Node.JS as the
backend, ReactJS as the frontend and Express as the medium between them. We also used Firebase API as our Authentication. We purposefully made the design minimalistic, using simple vector graphics
as users are more likely to stick to a simple web experience. The app is short and brief, its made to be a 5 minute look at the end of the day,
not an app users constantly use. Our design principle, thus extends to the UI/UX of the page, appearing as minimalistic as possible, with the
landing page a serene sunset with drops of dew in the sky.
This project was, as any hackathon project is, fret with challenges from the inception of the project. For one, our team is compromised of
two beginners and two individuals with only some experience in hackathons. That makes it such that our team's knowledge base of web development
was limited, and as such involved a lot of learning as we went. Not only this, but of the developers with experience none of them
had used the MERN stack before to create a web app. Another challenge came from hosting our project, as originally it was going to be hosted
through google cloud services, but having a Node.JS backend and ReactJS frontend would not work without payment on the part of us. As such, we migrated our project
to be hosted on Heroku. As well, one of our biggest problems was merging the front and backends together, as different packages and npm installations
resulted in incompatabilites for the code individuals wrote.
We are proud to have created a working prototype of our project, and sticking true to our design principles for our final result. Not only that, but we are proud to have created this project as a team of relative beginners to hackathons, and having a clean and professional looking UI for our project.
Through this project we learned how to develop web applications using the MERN stack. This stack is widely used in web development, and as such this was a fun and useful project to complete. As well, our members that were unfamiliar with hackathons got hands on experience with hackathons and web development.
The future of LYFE is diverse and broad. LYFE serves as a simple, once-a-day app to record basic healthy habits. As such, the app can be expanded to have more health habits to track for one. As well, the leveling system needs to be expanded to allow the user more incentive to continue their habits.