Kitty Care

Inspiration

Many young girls are often thrown into the dark when it comes to learning about their own bodies. Bodily functions change quickly during adolescence, and some might be shy or scared to simply "Google it." Kitty Care is in consideration of girls who are just starting on their journey to adulthood, and perhaps to help out their stressed parents along the way.

What it does

Kitty Care was built with the purpose of education and destigmatization in mind, providing a fun way for these girls to learn how to care for the different stages their body goes through every month and how to deal with the stress of change. Children can make accounts to track their periods, receive motivational messages, log how they're feeling daily, get reminders to take care of themselves, and best of all, care for their very own kitten that's there to support them the whole way through. Parents can make an additional account to attach to their child's account and see their tracking data in order to help them navigate irregularities in their cycle or running out of hygienic supplies, for instance.

How we built it

We built a Flutter application using Firebase services in order to simplify the iOS app-building process in XCode and drew all the assets by hand. Furthermore, we used the Gemini API to send personalized messages to the user through their in-app "mailbox."

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out how to move around each of the buttons on the app screen in the end, after we attached images to them, took us a fair amount of time. Google authentication for each user was also a pain point as we kept running into conflicts with the newly installed software.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Most of our team are part of the Women in Computer Science club at Stony Brook University, and we are all proud to present an app that'll uphold our mission of supporting women, and this time, not just within the computing field.

What we learned

We learned how much of an arduous process implementing Google authentication from scratch is, as well as working as a team on multiple different parts of a project which we then have to consolidate and make sure work together properly.

What's next for Kitty Care

We would like to implement some additional features, including improving the Parent side UI and only connecting the Parent to the Child accounts with the Child's permission in order to respect the privacy of children who might not be comfortable sharing such information with their guardians.