Don't Panic!

Hardware Form design 2
Tech related ADRID
Hardware Form design 1
Paper UI prototypes. Push notification > Day view of anxious periods > Week view showing anxious periods and a weekly reflection

Inspiration

Experienes with mental health issue and navigating therapy sessions. Therapy would involve a lot of 'homework', one sheet of paper with a series of questions and space to reflect. These questions where useful but the format and medium in which these where prescribed was not optimal for our busy lives.

What it does

Brad has social anxiety, once a week he goes to CBT therapy sessions with Janet his therapist. He he given weekly homework by Janet to journal which situations trigger his anxiety. It's often difficult for Brad to remember a week later what situations caused spikes in his anxiety, and sometimes when he experiences anxiety he isn't able to get out his diary to write them down.

Don't Panic! is a small IOT device disguised as a Zippo lighter to be discretely used hidden in a pocket - it has a button on it for users to press every time they are feeling anxious. These button press signals are sent to the Don't Panic! app where it logs a single button press or a series of button presses on a calendar. 5 minutes after the button is pressed a push notification is sent out to prompt Brad to write about his experience and triggers.

The Don't Panic! app will give Brad the ability to share dated, detailed and often complex information with his therapist to help manage his mental health. Outside of therapy he'll be benefitting from the prompts to reflect upon his anxiety triggers journalling his feelings and to see previous journals to see progress or spot downward trends.

How we built it

Design Thinking principals as an approach to product design - This translated into what shape the device became, thinking of the user first meant that we made something a person with anxiety would want to use, something that doesn't draw attention to their condition but allows them to subtly track when they're feeling anxious to recall at a later date, at therapy for example.

Using TinkerCad to build the 3D model and a printer to print out prototypes.

From a tech perspective, we have both Hardware & Software;

Firstly, we setup a Raspberry Pi Zero running a Node.js application that sets up the RPi as a BLE Peripheral which allows us to connect from our Mobile application.
Our Mobile application is built for iOS and uses SwiftUI & CoreBluetooth to configure a connection with our RPi. The mobile app simple receives incoming data from the RPi device and saves these 'events' in a local CoreData (SQLite) database which allows the user to gain insights on how anxiety affects their daily lifes.

Challenges we ran into

Don't Panic! isn't finished just yet as we are only a team of 2 and hardware always likes to add roadblocks

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing something purposely simple, with the 3D product design done all from scratch to fit the specifications of the hardware. State management with Swift UI - something Josh has never done before. Being able to set up the 'master' 'slave' connection between the two devices via bluetooth.