Digipet

Digipet, a virtual AI companion that helps you regulate your screen time.

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Inspiration

Overconsumption of media and high screen times have caused a staggering increase in anxiety, depression and other mental disorders (link). Apps like the forest and Android's digital wellbeing, which uses a similar concept, had encouraged us to join the push for improved mental health and well-being.

What it does

Digipet is an AI companion which watches content with you, and when screen time gets too high, it will get tired, influencing the user to stop consuming media. Not only this, but Digipet can also connect to your phone apps such as fitness apps, calendar and alarms to give you reminders and personalised messages.

It will also use AI to determine the tone of message and timing of pop-ups which have the greatest impact on you, adjusting its behaviour accordingly. For example, if you continue to consume media after your Digipet appears, it knows it didn’t work and will try a different strategy the next time.

Digipet can also be given access to read your screen, and if you’re doing something productive it may show an encouraging message, and alongside it a reminder to take breaks every now and then.

Apps like Digital Wellbeing and Apple Screen Time set strict and unnatural time limits on app which is ineffective for users that have varying usages throughout the week. Digipet fixes this issue by using AI to read usage trends and dynamically adjust pop ups accordingly.

How we built it

We used Figma to design an interactable app. Project organisation and structuring was done through Google Docs. Discussions and collaboration was through real life meetings and Discord.

Challenges we ran into

Our brainstorming stage took a significant amount of time to ensure that the product we were designing was effective in solving the problem statement and tackled relevant issues. Certain ideas such as taking away user coins for bad behaviour had to be scrapped due to a study we found about the negative effect of punishing users (link)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were very happy with the quality of work completed for a 2-day project.

What we learned

We learnt how to use Figma in an effective manner. Due to the tight deadlines, we also learnt the important steps in project organisation to ensure that our work was done within the time limit and to a high standard.

What's next for Digipet

We would love to see Digipet running on iPhone and Android one day. To start off, we want to focus on one pet with many animations to give a very real and emotionally engaging experience for the user.

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