Ducktape and Hope

Inspiration

We began simply with McKenny's challenge: to improve the quality of life of immobile hospital patients. From there, we brainstormed what an immobile patient might still have control over and how we could use that to give them some independence and autonomy over their environment (lights, fan, temperature, etc.). For a good portion of the first day, we worked on using eye-movement tracking since that was something we felt was really innovative and promising. Alex has had some previous project experience with visual tracking, but also with voice commands, and that is what we eventually pivoted to. We switched to voice because of time, technical, and accessibility concerns. For one, the eye tracking software we had would not have a good success rate in low-light/dark settings. We also wanted to increase accessibility as well, and since not every device has great cameras, this application would not be suitable for some. And lastly, it would require amounts of data that are not feasible for us to collect in 2 days. Voice command was our most accessible option because it is inexpensive to implement, does not require any dexterity or mobility, and able to operate from most areas of a room. It is inexpensive to implement because it requires only a microphone, which most devices already come with, which also makes it sustainable, since no new materials are being made.

What it does

Our application uses voice recognition to run a home assistant so that patients can use voice commands to tap into the controls of the room without needing to leave the bed. Some of the actions our application can manipulate are the temperature of the room, fans, blinds, lighting level, and position of the bed.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of time was spent figuring out the API, and also realizing we would not be able to reach an end product if we continued down the eye-movement tracking idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our idea, our teamwork, and how much we were able to accomplish in less than 33 hours.

What we learned

Claris

For myself, who's studying chemical engineering, it was very interesting to see the coding side of things and all the copyright and privacy issues relating to cloud storage. I learned a lot about the legal roadblocks that might affect our project if implemented, and also about why clients like hospitals might be interested in what we're doing here.

Alex

I learned that more caffeine doesn't always equate to better code. Jokes aside, I certainly learned the limits of duct taping projects together and expecting a decent output. We worked on top of older systems out of fear of updating and breaking something, but I feel like we still managed to make a pretty decent project. Emad and Claris saved my life during this project, with Emad building the request interface in Python and Claris maintaing our focus and managing where we devoted our time, I'm unbelievably grateful for their work.

Emad

Being a computer science student, this project was extremely helpful for me. I worked on the Rest API and fully implemented it in python. Using proprietary software and specific API helped me truly understand how they work and what they do. In just two days, I fully grasped the concept of API's and rest API's through this project.