Sunburn Sundial
Sunburn Sundial: An App Keeping Fun in the Sun from Going Overdone
This past weekend at Bitcamp 2019, my team and I took on the mission of developing a mobile app to help prevent painful summer sunburns. As pasty STEM students ourselves, we know all too well how easy it is to overdo it in the sun. Thus, Sunburn Sundial was born!
Sunburn Sundial uses the user's GPS location at launch to pull current UV index data. Users then select their skin tone to generate a personalized time estimate for safe sun exposure before burning. This countdown timer begins when you indicate starting an outdoor activity, providing a simple visual cue to get inside when time's up.
Building this app end-to-end encompassed learning experiences across the stack. Accessing the phone's location and permissions was an initial hurdle, but we implemented a streamlined user flow following Android best practices. The frontend UI came together smoothly as we focused on simplicity and intuitiveness.
Behind the scenes, we integrated the OpenUV API for real-time UV data based on time and coordinates. Pulling this all together took advantage of Android SDK features like okhttps3 requests and JSON parsing.
While a weekend hackathon means limited scope, we're proud of having built a working proof of concept for an idea addressing a common summer pain point. Making even a small dent in reducing sunburn cases would be a major win!
Going forward, we're excited to continue refining Sunburn Sundial and potentially explore expanding it to other platforms beyond Android. Try it out on Github!