EventHalo

EventHalo makes networking frictionless, by letting you connect with other people with nothing more than a handshake.

Inspiration

When you are at any kind of event, networking is such a hassle - either you're juggling business cards, or you're bumping phones. With EventHalo, you can network with someone else by simply shaking hands.

What it does

EventHalo provides event management with cheap, reusable bracelets; you turn up at an event and are provided with a bracelet, tied to your identity - just as if you had a lanyard or nametag.

As you walk around, meeting people and shaking hands, the bracelets figure out who you just shook hands with, instantly connecting you to the other person.

How we built it

The system was built in two parts - website and bracelet; the website allows someone to signup, join and attend events; then, we constructed the bracelets - designed to be handed to attendees on arrival.

As they move around, meeting people and shaking hands, the website shows who you connected with, when you connected with them, and which event you both met at.

Challenges we ran into

The hardware itself was challenging, as the prototyping platform, Mbientlab's Metawear RPro, was not directly programmable, which meant that it had to be controlled with an external system (i.e. Java on Android), which none of the team had prior experience with.

We had particular difficulty working with Metawear's processing routes, as we were not able to figure out how the calculations systems worked; in the end, we calculated off the raw vectors coming out of the chip, to figure out when handshaking had taken place.

We also tried a lot of different technologies to achieve our desired approach, namely looking at Bluetooth to calculate object distances and gather IDs; unfortunately this approach wasn't viable due to a variety of factors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting it working!

In all earnest, having it register simultaneous handshakes without registering false handshakes (e.g. someone with a band shaking hands with someone who doesn't) is fantastic.