Mobile app for a research project on sustainable city habits

About the client

A business school in Germany. One of its applied research projects studies how a city can lead residents to greener, healthier habits.

Objective

The school needed a mobile app for that project and had none. The project tests one idea: an app with smart city techniques leads residents to green, healthy services from local companies. Examples are public transport, a gym or healthy food from a supermarket. The researchers also wanted to check whether a resident takes up a proposal and benefits from it.

What we built

A cross-platform mobile app for Android and iOS. Residents record their activity, accept challenges, plan routes and see the CO2 they save. One React Native developer and one PHP developer built it from scratch in two years.

Activity tracking

• Record running, walking and cycling with their duration, in the foreground and in the background.
• Read the user’s location in the background and when the app is closed.
• Count time and distance with a timer that runs only while the phone detects movement. These modules are native, in Java and Swift.

Challenges, routes and CO2

• Propose activity challenges: walking, jogging, cycling, stairs up and stairs down.
• Propose company challenges, based on activities of local businesses.
• Build a route to a chosen point with a choice of transport. The app draws the map and follows the user’s position.
• Detect arrival at the end point and send a push notification.
• Calculate the CO2 saved on a trip from the transport mode and the distance, against the same trip by car.

Result

The apps are on Google Play and the App Store (client data). Two developers built them in two years (client data). The CO2 calculation covers four transport modes: foot, bike, car and public transport (client data). We build this kind of app as part of our mobile app development service.