Beats | Devpost

Inspiration

The inspiration for the project Beats came from the desire to create a more authentic and accurate way for people to communicate their emotions online. Traditional text-based messaging can be misinterpreted, leading to misunderstandings and conflicts. With the increasing use of data analysis and quantification in various industries, it seemed like a natural next step to apply this to the realm of emotions.

What it does

Beats is a real-time messaging app. The unique thing is that it can show each person's emotions in conversation. It achieves this by utilizing large amounts of data captured by Apple Watches, including heartbeat and blood oxygen levels. It also uses sentiment analysis models to determine the mood of individual messages. If demanded, it can generate detailed reports for a given conversation to visualize data in various ways and provide further insights. By incorporating emotional analysis into the conversation experience, Beats has the potential to create clearer, deeper and more authentic connections between users. In particular, we believe this app can disrupt the dating app industry.

How we built it

We used Swift to provide a smooth user experience and to better integrate with Apple Watches. We chose Firebase as the backend to simplify the development process and utilize its powerful SDKs and scalability potential. Firebase's DataSnapshot made real-time conversation easier to achieve. Because of Python's effective data-related libraries like pandas, seaborn and TensorFlow, we mainly used it to implement emotional analysis algorithms and on-demand data visualization.

Challenges we ran into

We have never done any project like this before, so the learning curve was quite big. We took an overnight bus from Ontario, and any rest was luxurious because of the short timeframe and the big project scale. We ran into Swift package dependency issues, third-party data access prohibition problems and countless build failures. We almost lost all progress because of the improper use of Git. A lot of times, it seemed that the project was not doable. But we managed to think of workarounds and learn from experts. Another challenge was dealing with the complexity of the emotions, which are multi-dimensional and difficult to quantify. This required careful consideration in the design and development of the app to ensure that it could accurately capture and convey the nuances of human emotions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our app is quite complex. We managed to make it work within 24 hours.
This is everyone's first time developing an app related to smartwatches. We learned new things and applied them well.
We are proud that we came up with good ideas as a team and managed to make things work in the end. We think this is a cool project.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the technologies we used, especially working with Apple products. We also learned to corporate and overcome difficulties as a team.

What's next for Beats

We want to integrate Beats into popular applications like iMessage, Instagram and Tinder. In addition, the app's ability to track and analyze emotions can be used as an emotional coach. It can help users better understand their feelings and other people's feelings and provide suggestions for coping strategies and mental health resources.