B.Tech capstone project Completed
Eco Drive: gamified carbon footprint tracking
A mobile app that detects how people travel, calculates the carbon emissions of every trip, and uses points, badges, leaderboards and community challenges to nudge them towards greener commuting.
How can technology help people close the gap between climate awareness and their daily travel habits?
Key findings
- Published in the journal IJSREM.
- Supports UN Sustainable Development Goals 11 (sustainable cities) and 13 (climate action).
How we did it
The problem
Most people underestimate the climate impact of their daily travel, and the tools meant to help them ask too much: existing carbon calculators expect users to enter every trip by hand, so people stop after a few days. We wanted to know whether technology could close the gap between knowing and doing.
How Eco Drive works
- It detects trips automatically. GPS, the accelerometer and Android’s activity recognition tell whether a trip was made by car, bus, bike or on foot, so users barely need to type anything.
- It turns each trip into emissions. Emission factors convert mode, distance and duration into a carbon footprint, compared with regional and global averages.
- It rewards greener choices. Points and badges for walking, cycling or public transport, and leaderboards that make sustainable travel competitive.
- It makes change social. Users form community groups and work towards shared reduction goals.
- It protects personal data. Location data is sensitive, so sign-in uses OAuth 2.0 with Firebase Authentication, and data travels over SSL with JWT-based sessions.
The design principle: information alone rarely changes behaviour. Making the better choice visible, rewarding and social works better.
Why this matters beyond the app
Eco Drive is a small version of a big business question: how do you change behaviour, not just inform people? It is the same problem I later met in two very different settings: students who value sustainable food but buy on price (dining research), and employees who keep old manual steps alongside a new system (change management). In all three, the answer starts with making the desired behaviour easier and more rewarding than the old one.
What I learned
How to turn a behaviour problem into product features, how to design around privacy from the start, and how to write research for publication. The project was published in the journal IJSREM and supports UN Sustainable Development Goals 11 (sustainable cities) and 13 (climate action).
