T#219 Olympic BPM

UPDATE: Top 10 Finalist at LA Hacks 2016, Runner-up for LA 2024 Sports Entertainment Category

Inspiration

The Olympics is a globally recognized event that captures the attention of people all over the world. It is a time where countries all over the planet compete to gain national pride. Seeing as Los Angeles will be bidding for the 2024 Olympics, we really wanted to show all the visitors and guests (whether it be on the television or in person) that LA is a city of innovation, progressive change and creativity. Therefore, we wanted to bring bring an interactive experience to the Olympic game audiences as well as viewers at home. In the stadiums, we give each audience member a microsoft band (or another fitness band) and measure their heartrate and movements throughout the event using sensors in the band. Through these measurements, we want to visually display the excitement of the crowd by lighting up their seat with color. These colors correspond to how excited the audience member is. This means that the entire stadium will light up with the audience reaction.

What it does

A Microsoft band provides the heartrate, gyroscope and accelerometer measurements. We can use these measurements to determine how excited the audience is and then the seats will correspondingly light up with a specific color. Additionally, the movement of the audience member (like fist pumps) will be measured by the band and the lights will flicker corresponding to the fist pump movement.

How we built it

We used a microsoft band to gather data, programmed the arduino to control the LED light strip on the chair and also wrote a short IOS app for the audience/at home audience to view the LIVE heartrate data of the live spectators.

Challenges we ran into

Porting the information off of the microsoft band via bluetooth turned out to be a huge problem. We did not have time to fix all the bugs necessary to integrate all the components.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think that the experience as a whole was a great idea. We constantly came up with ways to improve or add on to the current features.

What we learned

We learned how to write our first IOS app and learned about the difficulty of integrating components that run on different types of code. Also, we definitely learned a lesson about time management as we felt like we were a bit rushed to the finish.

What's next for Olympic BPM

We definitely didn't have enough time to integrate each individual piece of the experience (integrating the microsoft band to the arduino and our light strips). Additionally, we would like to work on further developing our IOS app and more at home audience interaction.