Ambience

Dashboard with good ambience score
Dashboard with neutral ambience score
Dashboard with bad ambience score
History
Ambience Sensor Hub

Inspiration

The ambient environment around a person can have a significant impact on their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. When thinking about our own health, we often think about ourselves but neglect to consider the impact of the environment we live in.

What it does

Ambience quantifies the environment around us as an ambience score that reflects the positive or negative impact on our wellbeing. It also provides us with practical suggestions on how to improve our ambient environment.

How we built it

First, we have the hardware - the Ambience Sensor Hub. The sensor hub comprises of an Arduino 101 and three Grove sensors for temperature, light and sound. The sensor hub works on a timer, measuring the ambient temperature, light and sound in one minute intervals.

The measurements are stored in the sensor hub together with a time stamp from the real-time clock. The measurements and time stamp are made available via Bluetooth Low Energy and connected Bluetooth devices are notified of the updates.

The software component is the Ambience companion app. When the app starts, it connects to the sensor hub over Bluetooth. The app synchronises the real-time clock with the time on your iPhone and downloads the ambient temperature, light and sound measurements.

Taking into consideration the current time together with the ambient measurements, an ambience score is calculated and displayed on the app dashboard. The higher the Ambience score is, the more positive the impact the ambient environment has on your wellbeing.

The dashboard also displays suggestions for areas of improvement. You can also view a history of past ambience scores and readings, [pause] and personalise options such as when you go to sleep.

Challenges we ran into

Getting up to speed with Arduino and Xamarin development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Developing a useful application that will have a positive impact on people's lives.

What's next for Ambience

There are many improvements that can be made to Ambience in the future. This includes:

Calibrating the sensors for better accuracy
Adding more sensors such as air quality
Adding WiFi or cellular capabilities for cloud connectivity without the range limitations of Bluetooth
Adding services to allow health professionals to monitor your ambient environment
Integrating Ambience into a wearable device which you can carry around with you at home and in the workplace.