Inspiration
We were inspired by our prior research into water sustainability. Our concerns focused on how individuals impact our freshwater sources, and how we could limit this impact. We discovered that food contributed to around 80% of the average person’s water footprint, which could be reduced simply by making conscious purchasing decisions. Seeing how much water a food product adds to your total score acts as a way to gamify conserving water.
What it does
Waterprint is a platform that allows users to conveniently track their water usage and compete with friends. Users list the products they bought and the water footprint of the product is then used to calculate their water usage. Competing with friends provides a strong motivation to decrease unnecessary water usage improving water sustainability around the world.
How we built it
Our web app is built with a Django backend and a CSS/HTML frontend. We use SQLite for the database, which keeps track of profile information. We use the scikit-learn and natural language toolkit libraries to perform search queries.
Challenges we ran into
This was our first time creating a database with such a large scope of functionality and as a result we ran into many challenges during implementation.
One of the challenges we ran into was creating the User model. Linking different users to functionality such as water usage, friends and grocery lists proved to be a challenge. However, the hours we spent brainstorming different database architectures was a valuable experience that we learned a lot from.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of creating a simple and intuitive user interface that connects seamlessly with our backend.
One feature that we are particularly proud of is having stored the user’s monthly and weekly statistics. We needed a way to separately query instances of a user’s account from different time periods and by adding this feature, the application was able to provide much more extensive analytics.
Many of our other features are also dynamically updated with user interactions providing a cohesive experience.
What we learned
We learned a lot about managing databases when storing user information. We use the database in many ways, such as storing friends, followers, lists of items, and user data,
What's next for Waterprint
In the future, Waterprint will incorporate more methods of water usage tracking such as tracking of home appliances (washing machines, dishwashing machines), showers and faucets to better track the usage of water by individuals.
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