Flora Fit

Get ready to turn over a new leaf and start walking!

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Inspiration

Studies show that "walking-based exercise training alleviated anxiety and depression in adults, and moderate and intense walking exercise promoted lower blood pressure and improved mental health by reducing negative emotions" citation. With journaling becoming more popular as a practice for mental wellness, we sought to combine these two actions engagingly to encourage pro-mental health behaviors. Our project draws inspiration from popular apps like Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Streetpass for the 3DS to deliver a fun and unique outdoor experience.

What it does

What lies in store outside? The answer to the question will soon come to you when you play Flora Fit. When you venture outside, you'll encounter cute little flora friends called Sole Mates, who will accompany you along your journey as you aim to spread awareness of the importance of biodiversity in our communities in the face of invasive species. In areas of nature, you might come across some "root routes", marked by green trees on your hub map. These stops along your journey will encourage you to write an introspective journal entry based on the scenery you're in. To reward journaling, you will be gifted new seeds that can grow into a full-grown plant over time by walking around a certain amount of steps. Additionally, to reward you for hitting >5000 steps a day, you will be gifted with items that can be used to fight in invasions.

Make sure you're careful about invasions! Invasive plants in California can spread quickly and cause damage to communities, so it's important to manage them by using the items you've found. Who knows, maybe you might get some unique rewards!

Players can review their journey in their greenhouse, where they can interact with many flora they've met on their journey and learn more about their species and their environmental impacts.

Hopefully, you'll learn something about nature and grow yourself!

How we built it

Our app is powered by Google Maps and Google Places to dynamically fetch stops (or "root routes") for players to journal based on the geographical features of the regions they're in, while still ensuring all players in the same area will be shown the same stops for multi-player features in the future.

To obtain a player's step count, we use an Expo library called Pedometer for live updates of steps within the app.

To make journaling more personalized, we use the player's live location to create a prompt to inspire introspection (using Gemini)! This also insures players checking into the same root route may have unique journal prompts.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of issues with Android compatibility and Expo in general. It's mainly rooted (hehe) in the fact that it's difficult to reliably fetch player health data. There are a lot of bugs surrounding step counts. One of them is the functionality to count steps ONLY being offered for iOS.

Additionally, another challenge we faced was finding an API that was able to pull native plant data for an area. We considered various options for this task including: the Google Maps Pollen API, USDA Plant Database, and various other miscellaneous APIs. Our first choice of API was the Google Maps Pollen API because our application was already utilizing additional API services from Google Maps. As such, the setup would have been much easier. However, we ran into an issue where the Pollen API would not give us plant information based on a specific coordinate location, and the types of plants retrieved from the API were limited to trees, weeds, and grass. Unfortunately after a lot of research we found this API was not suited for us. Our next top consideration for a plant information retrieval API was the USDA Plant Database. Our initial stages of research had revealed that this database had everything we needed to make this project work: large selection of plant species, their descriptions, and even which counties the plant could be found in. However, this database did not have an API that exposed its information to the public. There were several other APIs that we also came across during our research, however, they were limited by not allowing location as a parameter for the API query.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using the Places API heightened the polish of the app. We didn't want to hard-code a limited number of stops in our app, so using this will give our app scalability in the future if we decide to develop it further.

What we learned

We had to learn to be adaptable and flexible. Coming into this project, we had very lofty goals of functioning multi-player features, which didn't pan out. We had to refactor these concepts to make it feasible to code in 36 hours (i.e. single-player invasions).

What's next for Flora Fit

  • Multiplayer Experiences! Currently, raids are single-player, but that's no fun long-term. Having multiple players be able to participate and contribute the items they find along their journey would enhance the feelings of interconnectedness amongst one's local community. We would also like to implement a friend list and the opportunity to pollinate your Sole Mates with other players' Sole Mates to potentially get rare plants – like how you can crossbreed plants in real life!

  • More Plants! Because we aren't Figma Picassos, drawing cute graphics for our app takes us a while. As such, we had to limit ourselves to 5 plants for LA Hacks, all of which are native to Southern California. We hope to have tiers of plants in the future (like plants you can only gather in raids, aquatic plants, etc). Additionally, we would like to be able to tag plants to only spawn in certain regions.

This idea could be fleshed out in so many ways, so stay tuned to see what lies in store for Flora Fit.

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