Epiphany

Inspiration

We want to help people use technologies to increase their happy time, yet most social media is designed to increase general time spent, usually resorting to psychological tricks. Current ways to treat social media addiction are primitive and don't follow addiction treating research. We want to focus on hard science to do it well.

What it does

We take a data-oriented personalised approach to learn the user's habits and then take adequate steps to promote reduction of their unhappy time - not by blocking, but via motivation to do something else.

First we learn when the user is spending "happy time" and "unnecessary time" on social media. In the latter case, we take slow, but gradual steps to reduce their obsession - first by promoting what better they could do based on analysis with the Huawei APIs, then by self-reflection.

How we built it

We wrote an android application which monitors social media use habits, as well as additional data to help us classify "happy" vs "unnecessary" time. In addition we learn the user's general activity habits and hobbies and use this to make proposals when they spend unecessary time on social media.

Challenges we ran into

Android, perhaps for a reason, has not made it easy for apps to monitor activity within other apps. We spent a lot of our time debugging to get our data collection working.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Apart from managing to debug this and still get a demo out, we're happy that we managed to also use Huawei's APIs to detect and analyse the user's usage habits for better personalisation.