In academic year 2023-24 EWADA team supervised two undergraduate students for their final year projects: one related to creating a solid-based fitness tracking application, and another leading to an autonomous social media prototype.

SolidFitness allows users to upload their fitness and diet tracking data to their Solid pods (currently supporting Fitbit only). They can then choose from various recommendation algorithms to receive suggestions on how to improve their diet or exercise routines. These range from simple threshold-based algorithms to age and gender-based recommendations, cluster-based algorithms, and personalised recommendations. Through this process, users gain much more transparency and control over the data used by the Fitness app, compared to what is available on the current marketplace.

solid-based fitness app

SolidGram is based on a similar concept to Instagram but allows users to keep their posts in their own Solid pods, along with personal information such as their age, gender, interests, and browsing history. Leveraging on this control over personal data, SolidGram lets users choose from various recommendation algorithms to receive social media feeds based on their interests, location, or interactions with the the fees (likes or dislikes). Additionally, users can control which data is used by the algorithms to generate recommendations, giving them far greater data autonomy compared to traditional social media platforms.

solid-based social media app

It has been amazing to see both projects through from design to end-user evaluations over two academic terms. This demonstrates the flexibility of working with the Solid toolkit and protocol to build ethical applications that align with students’ own interests. It has also been exciting to observe how user studies from both applications have shown a positive perception of better control over personal data and the ability to choose between different recommendation algorithms. We hope to extend both projects for wider deployment and testing in the coming months. Please get in touch if you would like to know more.