Happy Hiker

Inspiration

I (Luke) am wilderness first ressponder cirtified. In my free time and summers I work for outdoor recreation companies and take people on multi day backpacking adventures. I am also apart of Michigan Adventure Leadership where I am a Michigan Outdoor Leadership Education Series (MOLES) instructor. Here I teach University of Michigan students how to have safe and successful backpacking adventures on their own. The most common thing I hear from people who'd like to take these trips is that they don't feel comfortable going on their own due to a lack of experience. We would like to bridge that gap by bringing Happy Hiker to as many backpackers as possible.

What it does

Happy Hiker has been trained on a wilderness first responder handbook. The same one I take with me in the woods when I lead trips. This gives Gemini 1.5 the context and ability to provide accurate wilderness first aid and camping information. A user is able to speak with Happy Hiker through the mobile app and have full conversations about any wilderness situations.

How we built it

We created a react-native mobile app with a flask/python backend. The backend interfaces with the Gemini 1.5 api and also handles training Gemini on the wilderness first responder handbook. We created the app in android studio but given more time, we would test its cross platform capabilities.

Challenges we ran into

Our team has very little experience with mobile development and rest APIs. Through this process we were able to learn a lot not just about the respective frameworks but about mobile and web development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the accuracy Happy Hiker brings in its wilderness knowledge. It does surprisingly well in handling the complex scenarios we throw at it.