bearhug

Inspiration

Attending UC Berkeley, we are all busy students whose cortisol levels can be way too high. We have friends who want to prevent or circumvent negative tendencies during stressful moments of their lives. Grounding techniques are one of the top coping mechanisms in these times, but no one wants to open an app to do so.

What it does

Thus, we built bearhug. When you are really stressed out, just shake the bear a little and he will help you through it. There are three routines: the 5-4-3-2-1 method triggered by voice, the breathing routine, and the emergency help routine.

How we built it

Script to record samples to train an NLP
Learning TensorLite, which takes a machine learning model and compresses it into just kilobytes of size using quantizing
The first finite state machines triggered through voice or distress
The second finite state machine with time-constrained nodes
An OLED display that translates jpeg images into byte_arrays
A circular buffer inside to detect large differences of acceleration to notice sharp changes (internal history)

Challenges we ran into

We originally intended on using FPGA (Field-programmable gate array) to make custom hardware, which would have the benefits of much accelerated algorithms, as well as optimizing battery life, so the the bear stays alert for a longer period at a time. However, a mix of toolchain issues, incompatible ports, and more made us pivot to using Sparkfun Micromod.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned

This hackathon is every member's first hardware hackathon submission. Moreover, members also learned about different tools, including Tensorflow, Arduino IDE, and Hardware integration. We're also proud of our device's privacy level -- nothing goes off the chip.

What's next for bearhug

a low-power ml accelerator
accelerate some of the sensor data
Integrating health data -> https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/alexteboul/diabetes-health-indicators-dataset
Fine tuning sensor data and thresholds
Other potential routines Expanding types and use cases, for example
bearhug Kids: help kids fall asleep safe and sound, and have a buddy during stressful nights or after a nightmare