Paydometer

Everyone's set an exercise goal and then found themselves unable to complete it, lacking the motivation or desire to do so. The one other thing all of these failed exercise regimens have in common is that when you make them, you're really, truly committed to keeping them. We think we have an app that can help improve this situation for goals involving pedometers and step counts. Our solution? Pay your pedometer, and put your money where your mouth is. Our app allows users to set a step count goal for themselves, along with a timeframe in which to accomplish it. Then, to give them an incentive to keep to their plan, they are asked to pick an amount of money to put in escrow using their Venmo account, which they will receive back as they make progress towards their goal. After that, all they have to do is click on the pedometer functionality, and walk! One problem we faced in the creation of this app was that although the intended target market was users with Android Wear devices featuring pedometers, we did not actually have access to any of these devices to develop on. To work around this, we built a virtual pedometer sensor using the phone's accelerometer, which not only allowed us to develop on the hardware we had access to, but also expanded the usability of our app onto more devices. One of our goals for this app was to make it visually appealing. It's one thing to make an app that keeps your money until you walk a certain number of steps, but to make an app that will encourage people and help them meet their goals, we needed it to have visual and aesthetic appeal as well. We feel that we have achieved this goal with a friendly, open feel to the app that allows users to easily navigate the app and conveys the spirit we had in mind. Building Paydometer allowed us to encounter a number of new aspects of API use. Mainly, we learned about the use of an API at all. Prior to this hackathon we had very little experience using an API, and this is in fact only the second project we've built with an API amongst all three of our team members. This experience promises to be helpful in any future development projects or hacks, as it will allow us to expand the scope of our work, and more experience with APIs can only make related work on them faster. Looking forward, we hope to expand Paydometer to include Facebook integration so that users can compare their stepcount to their friends'. Additionally, we hope to allow people to sponsor one another, offering extra money into the pool to encourage their friends. This feature would be of even greater use, however, to corporations. Many corporations have some sort of employee fitness program, and Paydometer would allow them to easily incentivize employees to complete wellness goals, by using the most universal motivator there is - cash. Lastly, the app in its current state uses Venmo accounts for both the client and server, and we want to change the server side over to Braintree, which seems more fitting for this service. We attempted to set up a Braintree server here during the hack, but due to our lack of knowledge regarding ISU's network setup and policies, we were unable to get enough feedback to even determine whether it would be possible on this network.