Friendwell | Devpost

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Example health tracking

Inspiration

The creation of Friendwell was inspired by the community aspect of personal health: no one needs to go through hard times alone.

What it does

Friendwell encourages good habits with a focus on mental health. Users record their daily habits on the website, and are rewarded with points. Friendwell emphasizes the community aspect of personal health by offering users bonuses for completing tasks with friends. It also serves as a tracker for personal progress.

How we built it

Friendwell was built with a primarily HTML/CSS frontend. The backend was written in Python with a Flask framework and a Pandas database. The database stores a wealth of user information, including names, friends, and points earned in each category so that users can revisit their "good habit" history.

Challenges we ran into

Fleshing out the idea for Friendwell was challenging. With such an emphasis on community, how would we get users to interact with each other? Our solution was to (attempt) to include a location system with Google Cloud Services that enables users to do activities together, both spatially and temporally. Having a buddy may help people hold themselves accountable and get them to do things they would have a hard time doing alone.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Each of the team members that helped create Friendwell has their own portion of the site that they made, which reflects our unique backgrounds that happened to fit together well. Each team member worked on either the frontend, backend, or database.

What we learned

The business aspect of an idea can be just as important as the coding one. This happened to be one of the first challenges where the coding was not as hard as coming up with solutions for the holes in our idea. We learned that it is beneficial to start with a simple idea and finish it than to begin with complicated idea because it can get overwhelming to work on so many things at once.

What's next for Friendwell

Two important aspects of the concept of Friendwell that we plan on addressing are how to give points value to users, and how to keep users honest when redeeming points. One potential idea that could work for both shortcomings would be to work as a donation hub for other companies: we would donate money on behalf of participating companies to different organizations based on the number of points users earn in a given timeframe. We believe that this gives less of an incentive for users to lie since they will only be receiving moral, instead of monetary, benefit. In addition, these plans give more of a personal tracker aspect to the app: the only record you want to be is your own, and being able to view your progress can be helpful to users' "good habit" journeys.

Friendwell can also be deployed to friendwell.tech, which we have already claimed.