Feels

Inspiration

Many studies have shown that people have trouble coping with stress, leading to a large variety of personality and motivational issues that can affect their education and social lives. We decided to make an app designed for relaxation and meditation, with a focus on addressing some of the key stress trigger points.

What it does

While playing meditation music, the bubbles slowly move around the screen while expanding and shrinking at the same time to signify breathing in and breathing out. All the bubbles will shrink while the child breathes and will expand when the child breathes out, hopefully calming the child down.

How we built it

We built our application using Android Studio. The APIs that we used were Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services for the emotion detection and Camerakit for the camera feature. Additionally, we used Firebase’s authorization and storage for user authentication and file storage for the music. The video of the bubbles moving was made in Adobe After Effects.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was getting the camera to work. We first used the Camera API, but it was deprecated. Then we switched to Camera2 but we couldn’t get the image to bind to the SurfaceTexture. Lastly we tried the Camerakit API but the camera was rotated 90 degrees. Eventually, we figured out that it was an emulator issue because the computer’s orientation is landscape.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of making a fully functional app!

What we learned

We learned accessibility design while making our application user friendly. We also learned how to use Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services API and the Camerakit API.

What's next for Feels

We would like to make more levels for the game as well as options to favorite a song and to repeat a song. Additionally, we would like to have statistics on how well a child is doing for emotion recognition so that parents and teachers can track improvements and progression over time.