Face Alert System

An app that works like an alert mechanism to prevent us from touching our face and hence it can help to prevent the spread of covid-19.

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Problem Statement:

With the outbreak of Covid-19, health care professionals are urging people to regularly refrain from touching their face. There’s no question it’s easier said than done. According to a study, people touch their faces more than 20 times an hour on average. About 44 per cent of the time, it involves contact with the eyes, nose, or mouth.

From picking up objects to turning doorknobs, we’re constantly touching surfaces contaminated with pathogens.

The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is believed to be spread mostly by inhaling droplets released when infected individual coughs or sneezes. But the virus can also land on surfaces that we touch with our hands.

But as anyone who has consciously tried to do so knows, it’s hard. Touching our face is an act that most people perform without thinking. Whether it is something intrinsic to our species or learned behaviour, we continue to repeat it even if we intend to or not.

Inspiration

Asthma is one of the major diseases that my grandmother has faced. Because of which she can’t put on a face mask for the longer duration of time. She always wishes to have something that can perform both jobs parallelly, protect her from coronavirus and also not suffer from difficulty in breathing. That is why this idea of making a face alert system pitched to me.

What Is Being Done?

Government has made the use of face mask mandatory but we have seen at times people don’t put the face mask on due to various reasons such as:

  1. Face masks needed to be changed after every few days hence making the prevention costly.
  2. Many people have reported difficulty in breathing due to face masks.
  3. People do not put on their face masks when they’re at home but the chances of them getting infected still persists.
  4. Eyes of the person aren’t covered which is also a potential target for the virus.
  5. Hand Sanitizers are also used to kill the bacteria but as we all know that hand sanitizers are used less frequently as compared to our hands touching our face.

Our Solution:

An app that works like an alert mechanism to prevent us from touching our face and hence it can help to prevent the spread of covid-19. If the user moves his/her hand towards their face then the app generates an alert and the phone starts vibrating

It works as follows:

  1. When the user moves his hand, the device collects accelerometer data and sends it to the API as a JSON file.

  2. The API is backed up with a machine learning model.

  3. The machine learning model is well trained to differentiate when a hand is near the face and when it is not.

  4. Our backend algorithm calculates the Roll, Yaw and Pitch using accelerometer data which can be used to define the orientation of the device.

  5. So whenever the user brings his or her hand near the face, the backend model raises an alert and the device starts vibrating.

  6. We’ve further integrated Watson ChatBot with our app to help people with their covid related queries.

WE’VE USED SVM TO TRAIN OUR MODEL AS IT GIVES THE HIGHEST ACCURACY

We’ve currently designed the app for android phones and wearOS smartwatches.

Benefits of using our App:

This app won’t replace the use of facemask and hand sanitizer but it acts as a second line of defence to stop the spread of covid-19.

Facemasks don’t cover eyes and this can be an entry point for the virus. Hence using our solution we can prevent touching our eyes even when our face mask is on.

People generally don’t wear face masks at home, but the danger of getting infected still persists. Hence our app can provide all-round protection without even actually using it.

It’s like a boon to people with Asthma as they can't put their face masks on for a longer period of time.

Hand sanitizers are used less frequently as compared to our hands touching our face. Therefore our solution can help people when hand sanitizers aren’t easily available.

Business Model:

Our product is the second line of defence and it syncs perfectly in the background keeping the user uninterrupted with his daily tasks. And that’s the USP of our product.
SLIDE CHANGE Our Business model relies on the revenue generated by the ad’s that will pop up on our app. This is a win-win situation for both the users and developers. People need no extra device to implement our system. Hence it can be used by a large number of people. Therefore it can generate a large amount using ad revenues.

The users who want uninterrupted services with additional features like daily statistics can purchase our premium app.

Other sources of revenues can be generated by collaborating our idea with companies that manufacture fitness bands. They can integrate our solution into their mobile app and provide an additional feature to their users. Since no fitness band manufacturers have come up with a solution like this hence we can attract the companies with our idea.

  1. Such a system is non-existent in India (at least) thus making it a one-of-a-kind proposal. Hence this idea can attract a lot of investor’s

Future Roadmap:

Testing of the Fitbit app is under process and the stable version will be released soon also we're focusing to attain compatibility of our app with other fitness bands as well.

We can add an additional feature in future versions of the app that will alert the user if they’re near the infected user. Data of the users will be stored in the cloud Database. Hence this will attract more and more users to use our app.

We’re planning to deploy our system completely locally. Hence, users won’t require the internet to access the services.

FAQ:

Q. What all devices and OS your app has supported? We’ve recently released apps for smartphones (for testing purpose) and smartwatches (for Wear OS watches), development of the app for other devices are under processes such as Fitbit and Fossil.

Q. What if we don’t have an internet connection? The first version of our app requires the internet to operate but we’re working on to deploy the system locally and the next version of the app won’t require the Internet to work on.

Q. While I’m on call will my band vibrate continuously? No, we’ve taken care of that problem therefore when you’re on a call the app gets an alert and it doesn’t vibrate, we’ve achieved this using PROXIMITY SENSOR.

Q. What is the accuracy of the model you’ve used? We’ve used different models to test and the model with the best accuracy is used for deployment. Currently, it’s accuracy is around 91%

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