Suncatcher app helps people to get enough sunlight during the day and prevent seasonal affective depression (SAD). Studies show that around 21% of Finnish population suffers from it. SAD mostly occurs during wintertime when people do not receive enough vitamin D and do not see a lot of daylight. Have you ever felt depressed, had low energy or sleeping problems in winter? Studies show that you will benefit from being outside more often.
Suncatcher allows to estimate the amount of sunlight you get daily (30 min per day is already enough!), track how much time you have spent outside during nice weather in the past week and plan your outside activities.
Besides preventing SAD, Suncatcher can help you to be more mindful and build a healthy habit of spending more time outdoors. Moreover, it has been proven that walking outside, especially in a park or a forest, helps to calm your mind. Thus, it might be also helpful for people who have to deal with a lot of stress or experience anxiety.
To create Suncatcher we used:
- Backend: Python, Flask, MongoDB, Docker
- Frontend: Javascript, React Native, Expo
In the future we want to add a bunch of new cool features:
- Sharing the user’s planned outdoor walks with his/her friends, so they could join the user for a walk
- Option to manually enter the time of walks, so that user can go for a walk without the phone and minimize interaction with his/her phone
- Advanced recommendations where app would suggest user to go to nearby parks, forests or activities outside
- Extra analytics features for walking history: comparison of weekly and daily progress progress, give recommendations based on the history of the user
