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One of the iterations of our main menu.
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The appetizers page, filled with small activities.
neutritious
As in neural, nutritious
For HooHacks 2024 🦉 | Live at neutritio.us
Inspiration 🚀
“Just like it’s hard to make really good food choices when you are already hungry, it’s really hard to make good dopamine choices when you’re already low on dopamine.” - Jessica McCabe
What's the solution? A Dopamenu!
By separating the planning and the choosing of dopamine-increasing activities, a dopamine menu provides the user with a curated, pre-chosen list of activities, making it easier to select the ones that will benefit them the most. Rather than waiting until you are hungry to decide if you should get fast food, planning ahead will help you make the best decision.
Our project aims to implement the idea of a dopamenu as described in the ADDitude article mentioned above, written by Melanie Wolkoff Wachsman.
What's on the menu? 🍽️
Much like a restaurant menu, the dopamenu is split into sections.
- Appetizers: Quick activities to give you a boost. Listening to a favorite song, having a snack, doing the Wordle.
- Entrées: Longer activities that contribute to a healthy and productive lifestyle while boosting dopamine levels. Practicing a hobby, exercising, baking.
- Sides: Supplemental activities to make boring tasks more palatable. Listening to white noise, playing with a fidget, working outside.
- Desserts: Activities that are easy to overdo, but are great in moderation. Streaming, playing video games, catching up with social media.
- Specials: Once-in-a-while events to look forward to. Going to a concert, seeing a film, going to a hackathon!
These categories allow the user to mindfully assess their situation and decide what kinds of activities to do.
Our implementation 🌐
Our webapp is built in Flutter, with Firebase powering authentication, deployment, and data storage on the backend.
Once the user logs in, they are greeted with the main categories of the dopamenu. selecting any of these will bring them to a list of activities. They can choose one of these, or press the Randomize button to roll the dice. The user can add their own activities, as well as like and dislike the built-in suggestions to curate their menu.
Challenges we ran into 🏃
One challenge we had was with the first rule of hackathons: do the cool stuff first. We let ourselves get bogged down at the beginning with authentication and databases because our app stores user data, and we wanted to work with that data throughout development. This made it more difficult to delegate work, as we were all working on and waiting for the backend to get going. We could have solved this by serving static data and implementing user data later down the line. Our dopamenu is still useful without personalized user data, and we could have considered this minimum viable product before jumping to integrate authentication and data storage. Overall, we are happy that we included these features, as working with Firebase was a great learning opportunity, but considering the minimum viable product would have allowed our team members to work stronger in parallel without downtime.
Accomplishments 🌟
There were a lot of "firsts" for our team members through this project! Three of us had never used Flutter before, and two us had no experience with Firebase. The four of us had not previously worked together on a project of this scale. We focused on trying new things this hackathon, and we accomplished that goal.
What's next for neutritio.us 👀
If we continue to develop this project, we would love to add interactive activities. For example, the "listen to a favorite song" appetizer would have Spotify integration, allowing the user to move from the menu straight to the activity, with no chance for distraction in between. Another example would be reading the accelerometer during the "ten jumping jacks" appetizer, encouraging the user to really get up and move.
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