## Inspiration

## What it does

Buddy is your personal assistant that monitors your device's screen-on time so you can better understand your phone usage statistics. These newfound insights will help you to optimize your time and understand your usage patterns. Set a maximum screen-on time goal for yourself and your personal assistant, Buddy, will become happier the less you use your device and become more unhappy as you get close to or exceed the limit you set for yourself.

## How we built it

We built an android app using the NativeScript framework while coding in JavaScript. Our graphics were created through the use of Photoshop.

## Challenges we ran into

As it was our team's first time creating an android app, we went through much trial and error. Learning Google Firebase and the NativeScript framework was a welcomed challenge. We also faced some technical limitations two of our 3 computers were unable to emulate the app. Thus our ability to do testing was limited and as a result slowed our overall progress.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

## What we learned

We were strangers when we met and had different backgrounds of experience. The three of us were separately experienced in either front-end, back-end, and UI/UX which made for a very interesting team dynamic. Handling better CSS, using better classes, and utilizing frameworks such as NativeScript were all things we learned from each other (and the internet).

## What's next for Buddy

Buddy will be venturing on to increase the depth of our phone usage analysis by not only including screen-on time but also usage by app. We also highly value user experience so we are looking into creating more customizable options such as different species of pets, colours of fur, and much more. An IOS app is also being considered as the next step for our product.
Domain.com Name = bubblejbuddy.com (currently having technical difficulties with pointing to heroku).

## Inspiration

I interviewed with my friend's younger cousin at UCI. He's something that is on the spectrum. And while I was interviewing him he gave me lots of hints that he fails to recognize emotional cues and really wants to have a companion that he can just talk to about random things. Then came the inspiration for Bubble J Buddy. Also because I love spongebob and bubble buddy is one of his best pals. This buddy is for everyone who needs someone to talk or someone to talk with.

## What it does

Bubble buddy has 7 distinct emotions shown: angry, scared, happy, sad, disgusted, thinking, and laughing. He chats with you by pulling a question or conversation line from a mLab mongodb database I set up with 29 questions and 35 conversations. He also lets you talk to him as a personal assistant with emotions attached by soundhound houndify api. And there's some secret marvel api secrets around his custom designed house :).

## How I built it

I used a MEAN stack template app and started hacking away. There were a lot of things I knew I could've done because bubble j buddy is like a chatbot. However, I wanted to convey the emotion with it so that's why I have made my own personal database of questions and conversations for now. In the future, once I made learned enough and got enough feedback with sentiment analysis from my questions or when the user of my apps send recordings or texts to bubble buddy. Then I can start doing some machine learning and building some solid conversations.

## Challenges I ran into

Not enough time to do all the designs and get everything I wanted when working by myself. If I had maybe 4 more hours I would've completed every feature that I would have wanted

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of

## What I learned

How to launch an app successfully from start to finish. How to use marvel api and soundhound api. Sleep is good for the soul. I slept for one hour total.

## What's next for Bubble J Buddy

Watson tone analyzer pairs well with my different animations for emotions. Also add comic books under the table for Disney Marvel API if I don't get that done quick enough. Use Watson API for Tone Analysis
## Inspiration

Our inspiration from Buddy came from a desire to make fitness and health tracking more engaging, meaningful, and fun in the hopes that it would open up a new wave of people to care about their health and enjoy living a healthier lifestyle.

## What it does

Buddy is a cross-platform lifestyle tracking app that features a virtual motivational buddy who represents the users mood and activity. Physical statistics allow the user to track their progress in respect to goals, and to chart these statistics over a week long interval to see how they compare to their goal. Another tab provides a look at some detailed statistics to track the user’s fitness level, as well as charts to plot longer term trends.

## How I built it

Buddy was made using Flutter, which connects to a Firebase database to sync and track health-related statistics about the user.

## Challenges I ran into

The Buddy team ran into a few issues during the development process. Firebase is very specific about how you access data, so we had difficulty getting single pieces of data to display. There were also configuration issues in the early stages of Buddy that slowed down the development process considerably, some of these issues were bad enough that team members needed to reinstall necessary software and reconfigure.

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As a team, the thing we are most proud of is that we've made a piece of software that can make a real-world, positive difference. Buddy has potential to get people more excited about their health, their fitness, and can encourage people to make positive changes in their lives. There is nothing we could be more proud about.

## What I learned

Everyone on the team learned lots during the development process. For most of us, it was out first time using Flutter. This was even the first introduction into mobile development for some of us! Working on Buddy taught us all a lot on asynchronous development, Firebase, Flutter, and more generally mobile development as a whole.

## What's next for Buddy

There are numerous ways to expand the features and functionality of this Buddy. One option that would be beneficial to add is the option for users to choose their own Buddy, as this would give them more customization options and could increase user engagement within the app. More detailed statistic tracking and google fit integration are also avenues that would be beneficial to explore to increase statistics coverage, accuracy, and convenience to provide the most accurate, convenient, and thorough health analytics possible.