Overview
During the Spring 2021 semester, which was my final semester at AU, I participated in a project for a capstone class. The goal for the class was to create a project that addresses a current real world problem. The AU Health Studies Department requested for the AU Computer Science department to develop a dynamic health/wellness app for AU students called "AUCares". The student wellness app would be tailored to the AU student body and accomplishes the following key points:
- Support positive behavior change by collecting data
- Share educational tidbits appropriate for the individual at given times
- Give the user insight to various similar groups of people connected to AU
- Provide motivation/connection
- Connect the user to exercise and social opportunities
- Include an option for the user to track data themselves
- Possibly provide appropriate discounts for local healthy food and exercise options
During the time of the pandemic and COVID-19, many people have concerns regarding their health and well-being. Students may not have much knowledge of their health and the resources available to them. Many students might want to pay more attention to their health, but they do not know how to start or have the motivation to do so. The intentions for this project are the following:
- Provide education and assistance
- Better the lives of students
- Facilitate long-term growth and development
- Learn about students at AU
Professor Mehdi Owrang recruited Anthony Baron, Reika Kitano, Isabella Sims, Elisabetta Gabriele, Nathan Kennedy, and myself to team up and develop this app. We knew from the beginning that the development of this app would take more than one semester, so our ambitions were to create a good foundation for it and provide well-written, organized documentation for the next group to continue the project in future capstone classes.
Collaboration
Our clients were Health Studies Professors Trina Ulrich and Jessica Yamamoto. The Spring 2021 semester was held online, so we kept in touch through virtual means (Zoom). We held virtual meetings with our clients every two weeks, and the team held virtual meetings every week to discuss accomplishments and upcoming objectives. We also had a group chat to communicate among the team. Whenever the team had many questions for our clients, we would compile them into an email to simplify communications. We used Github as our Version Control System.
Roles
Branding
I chose the color scheme from Coolors.
UI Design
I designed the UI and built the prototype using Figma.
Deliverables
The areas of health and well-being we focused on are the following:
- Sleep
- Physical Activity
- Occupational Health
- Fruit and Vegetable Consumption
- Social Health
- Emotional Health
- Hydration
Key aspects to the app were the following:
- Functional app for both major platforms (Android and iOS)
- Wheel of Wellness - The user has to be able to spin a wheel on the home screen to get a daily task (truth, dare, or question) that relates to one of the areas of health.
- A progress wheel to for the user to track their tasks and improvement.
- Connects the user to exercise, support, and social opportunities.
- User profile
- Login and sign up features
Tools and Technologies
Design
- Coolors - color scheme
- Figma - UI design and prototype
- Photoshop and Illustrator - graphic designs and survey graphics
Frontend
- React Native and Redux - frontend code
- Node.js - frontend code
- Visual Studio Code - IDE
- Android Studio - phone emulator for testing the application
Backend
- Express.js - backend code
- MariaDB/MySQL - creating and maintaining the database
- XAAMP - database manipulation
- Insomnia - testing the API endpoints
Roadmap
Branding
Sketches
Prototype
Code
Final Product
Add-Ons for the Future Group
Several additions that the next group who continues this project in the next semester could make include adding a groups/organizations page that people can use as a resource to connect with others, a leadership board to see how one fares compared to other users, community wall badges to award milestones and give motivation, an assortment of the difficulty of the tasks depending on one's progress, and monthly or yearly questionnaires to get a further sense of where the user is currently at in terms of their health.
Conclusion: Key Learnings
The application performs smoothly without any errors, loads relevant data about the screen the user is currently on and does not have any lag since the fetch data does not take a long time. The application works how it was initially designed. It operates on two major platforms, spins a task wheel, tracks user tasks and profile, and has a login and sign-up page.
One improvement that could have been made in the planning phase is to gather information from the clients earlier so we could have started developing faster. However, with the timeframe we were given, we made major developments to this mobile application. We hope that the next group continues to expand this project and eventually release it to the AU community for everyone to use.
Everyone on this project learned how to work together, manage time, and understand through discussions and explanations. We collaborated, either as the frontend/backend group or one whole group altogether, on complex problems and tasks, delegated roles, and held each other accountable. We also were able to effectively balance other classes, work on this project, and attend client meetings in an online environment. And lastly, we shared diverse perspectives as we all had different backgrounds and experiences in mobile app development. Overall, we are grateful that we were able to experience these essential skills during this project since they are crucial in the workforce.