Paws: The Teddy Bear

Inspiration

Teddy bears! Who doesn’t love them? So we wanted to hack a teddy bear to aid modern day parenting given that 46% of American households have both parents working full time to sustain the family, but losing out on critical time in their children’s early development years.

What it does

At the core of it’s warm fuzzy heart, Paws is well equipped with high definition, wide-angle cameras and built-in 3D binaural microphones to observe and listen in to each child through real-time video feed. The suite of hardware coupled with the combination of various Microsoft Cognitive Services and IBM Watson’s APIs, forms an intelligent companion that tracks daily emotional and behavioral patterns to watch over their children’s mental and cognitive health and personality growth along critical milestones in their infancy. Additional security features include an emergency notification and alert, using Twilio’s API, activated by distress patterns enabling parents to watch over their child’s safety remotely. More importantly, working parents often feel the guilt of not spending enough time with their children. Therefore, we offer unique methods of communications and foster deeper relations between both parties by allowing parents to record their heart-felt words, lullaby songs or bed-time stories to be played through care bear to their kids as and when they desire.

How I built it

We hacked an actual teddy bear soft toy bear to fit the required components (no bear was harmed in the process). The back-end was handled with Python, running the various APIs used in this project to monitor and report the child's emotional and psychological growth. We also created an app that offers real-time video monitoring and analysis reports.