ClearState

Main Screen

Inspiration

In recent years gambling and social media addictions have continued to become more and more prevalent. Nowadays on every major sports channel you will see advertisements for sports betting sites, on every major news channel advertisements for prediction markets. These sites allow high risk transactions and are highly subject to addiction or use in desperation. We wanted to create a solution that allows people to ensure that they are in a calm state when interacting with these sensitive sites.

What it does

ClearState allows users to choose apps on which they want to ensure they are in a calm emotional state when using. Once the apps are selected it will require them to go through a test using presage to verify that they are in a neutral or happy state. If the user passes the test then they will be granted access to the site. If the user does not display a positive or neutral state for 5 continuous seconds then they will be unable to access the app.

How we built it

We built ClearState using a pygame filesystem that we built from the ground up, designing our own custom engine that handles custom screens and modules, all being ported and run through main. In addition to the main program we built a script that checks what applications are open and then matches them against a text file with the names of locked applications, if a match occurs then the locked application is minimized and a presage emotional state test gui opens.

Challenges we ran into

In our attempts to turn ClearState into a reality we’ve run into a number of challenges. The most notable challenge was getting the script running in the background to interact with Presage. Both of these we could get to interact independently fine but having them work together was difficult. Creating the script which scans the system for files that match the names in the ban list was also a key challenge we faced.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some of the important accomplishments we made that we are proud of are the fact that we made the framework from scratch. Building a script which compares the names which were put into the restricted list with all available programs on the device. Integrating presage and getting it to display whenever a restricted app was opened or actively open.

What we learned

In building ClearState we learned just how much having AI in the loop can enhance the speed at which we develop. We also learned how to use and integrate Presage into a project. The final major thing we learned was how to build scripts.

What's next for ClearState

As ClearState has further development we will focus on implementing more options for restrictions, such as time based preventions which disallow apps after a certain time at night or a feature that adds a timer before the next time they are allowed to access the app. As it stands ClearState is only limiting users from accessing whole apps, currently when users want to instead access a specific website there are no guard rails. As of now ClearState only exists as a GitHub repo, this means that mobile users have no ability to use our program because of this we want to make ClearState into a mobile app. As Presage improves so will ClearState, we hope that we will in the future be able to detect if users are inebriated to see if they can safely access gambling sites or similar sites that allow high risk transactions.