The Innovation Challenge is a new program from FIRST, designed to inspire teams to create a solution and business plan to a problem surrounding a given prompt.
This year’s prompt: Identify a problem or opportunity and design a solution to help people (or a community of people) keep, regain, or achieve optimum physical and/or mental health and fitness through active play or movement.
Our Solution: waterMe!
waterMe is an innovative product designed to help motivate exercise. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a shortage of opportunities for physical activity, especially among teenagers. Our product is designed to link the concept of a plant’s need for water, to a human’s need for exercise. It can be a hassle to constantly check a pedometer, or to measure out a certain amount of time of exercise per week. waterMe solves this problem by showing a clear physical representation of the success of one’s exercise goals. waterMe takes the number of steps walked in a week, and translates it into an amount of water that is then distributed to a plant. The more steps walked, the healthier the plant is. Step goals are customizable, with a cap on the amount of water a plant can receive.