Mindful Posture

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Inspiration

We were inspired by our last years project of "Mindful gardens" and wanted to have a fun project that would have a tangible real world positive impact on the human population. We were also inspired by the principles of FIRST Robotics teams to always have a positive impact when conducting any project, to have a helpful outreach and result for the target audience, in our case being people with pastorally challenged individuals. Our design processes were built on how actual engineering teams like FRC teams work by working as a collaborative team each tackling a "sub team" and mini challenge to then solve.

What it does

Our top of the line, proprietary, self trained and actively learning program can use the Raspberry Pi Camera to track, analyze, and then evaluate the user's posture when working. It will provide motivation and feedback to the user to improve their posture through the indicator screen that displays their "pet rabbit" and a health bar. By having horrendous posture, the health bar of the bunny will decrease, and the image of the rabbit will become "deader" and "isolated" until the bunny eventually dies completely if they do not have good posture at all for a long period of time. Although, if they retain good posture, the rabbit can gain health back overtime. This product will single handily solve the world's issue of bad posture, enhancing productivity and physical health worldwide.

How we built it

We built it following the design processes of Woodie Flowers and Engineering, starting by brainstorming many different ideas that would result in a positive idea but narrowed it down to a fun but helpful posture tracker. We split the tasks up between Raspberry Pi Setup and Development, Screen Display Work (The game part), and finally the posture tracking YOLO software. After finishing our individual parts while having proper breaks and work life balance, we merged it all together as a team and created our final product, truly engineers.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was the waiting time in certain processes such as waiting for the Raspberry Pi to setup, Wi-Fi connections to it, and waiting for files to upload to our trained AI for it to understand what was "good" and "bad posture. This challenge made us really prep for the next steps after the waiting process for as much as possible while time was wasted for things to upload or download. Another major issue we faced was broken hardware with our screen indicator display which led to us pivoting to a backup temporarily for the entire 2nd day afternoon though we eventually returned to our initial idea when the display was fixed but only after 4 hours was spent on the backup idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud as most new beginners to a hardware hack project to this scale of being able to have a submittable project that worked. We are extremely proud of being able to create a project with a tangible impact on people that means something. We are also proud of doing this in a sustainable project way where no one was overworked and all the work was balanced.

What we learned

What we learned most is that preparation in a project is the most important factor for it to succeed. With limited time and impending doomed deadlines, mixed with software that takes ages to load and work, preparation is key for the project to actual finish on time. Otherwise, the final project will be uncompleted, and Janky without a proper usability. We learned the importance of collaborative teamwork to overcome this issue.

What's next for Mindful Posture

Mindful posture is just the start, a franchise with a deep product mix and line of mindful products is possible tackling hundreds of issues that are facing society. We hope to continue our mission of helping people in a fun and gamified way by updating mindful posture to add more features like seeing your rabbit pet actively grow and expanding the different services and products we offer. We hope to continue to have a positive impact on people.