SideProject: HappyBeam - Meditate and improve
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Happiness Apps Challenge
Side projects are some of the best way for developers to learn new skills and maybe a little cash :-). I really enjoy attending Hackathon’s, because they really push my skillset as a developer.
Most of my recently hackathons have required I learned android development, so I decided for my next project to buckle down and make a nicely designed, complicated android app. The HappinessApps challenge was the perfect excuse for me to build an app worthy of my portfolio.
For the HappinessApps hackathon, Kevin Coleman and Haider Khan interviewed 57 unhappy people via Mechanical Turk that used to meditate. We wanted to know why they stopped meditating. 32 users felt frustrated with meditation, because they never felt like they were getting any better and weren’t confident that meditation was improving their happiness.
Enter HappyBeam
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” -Peter Drucker
HappyBeam is the first app that is specifically designed to measure your inner peace by building up the bridge between physical movements and mental fluctuations. It helps you have a peaceful mind, reduce stress and depression, and improves your meditations. The less movement and lower the score that HappyBeam detects, the more you improve.
HappyBeam runs alongside meditation apps to measure how a user moves during a meditation. The app calculates a movement score using a cutting-edge algorithm. Happy-peaceful scores are marked green, not-so-good scores are yellow, high-anxiety scores are red.
In the “Your Meditations Chart”, users see their improving meditation scores across all their meditations. The history list shows a list of each session with a chart displaying when and how long they moved.
Currently, there is no other meditation apps that shows how a user is improving.
HappyBeam leverages the latest Android Wear technology so that users can measure motion with their smartwatch. This delivers a better reading of their meditation.
HappyBeam was built in 3 weeks for the Happiness Apps challenge.