AuraSense

Inspiration

A rising number of people face challenges with anxiety, stress management, and work. Few apps seek to intervene when it occurs. AuraSense provides a convenient way to stay on top of your stress management, with low friction to setup and take breaks.

What it does

AuraSense will intervene with the user as soon as their heart rate increases above a certain baseline level. This will detect their respirations per minute and display this to the user so that they can pause and practice breathing techniques until they calm down. It encourages them to get up and step away from the computer using their free WiLi as a method to practice the breathing techniques.

How we built it

Uses Presage to connect to a webcam to calculate a user's vitals, like heart rate and respiratory rate. We have a defined threshold and when that threshold is met it sends a message to the backend. In that message, using Photon, a message should be sent to a guardian and a message to wake up WiLi should also be sent. WiLi will try to do some sort of breathing techniques to try to calm the person down.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up the hardware took our team some time, as our background was primarily in software development and machine learning. We relied on our teammate who works with hardware to explain how to setup the controller, and in return we taught each other best software engineering practices in development and group collaboration.

We ran into several features we were unable to implement, such as displaying the camera while calling the Presage API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working with hardware integration! :D Our team came with diverse interests and backgrounds, so bringing together a meaningful project that we could contribute to was significant in our experience.

What we learned

Going through the architecture and ideation beforehand, and planning through our idea as a team. Our team also investigated several sponsor tracks in addition to the ones we decided to implement, to learn about new technologies. The API we used we new for our team, to be working with computer vision and handing data with hardware.

What's next for AuraSense

Future will integrate existing health data with Finch Node to create dynamic baselines for each user who decides to sign in. Keeping track of the number of attacks, depending on a user's history, so that more attacks will categorize it as higher risk. The goal is to turn this into an application, so it will seamlessly boot up when someone opens their laptop.