tomodatchi

Sad tomodatchi
Happy tomodatchi
Neutral tomodatchi

Inspiration

When people get older, they are more likely to face social isolation and thus, seek companionship.

What it does

A virtual pet, tomodatchi, that detects your emotion which would affect your pet's mood. As we want to improve the social sustainability of our older generation, we want to create a reason to help them feel better by reflecting your emotions to the virtual pet. We believe that seeing your pet also sharing your emotions, it will be the encouraging trigger to want you to feel better so that your pet can feel better too. Hence, this creates the virtual companionship that we would like to provide.

How I built it

We worked on the front end looks using ReactJS and ran the web application using the DragonBoard 410c.

Challenges I ran into

Each DragonBoards that our team borrowed had several issues. All the boards had problems with the attached arduino in which it's impossible to upload any kind of arduino code. We tried the sample codes, and none gave any result. We tried using echo to /sys/class/gpio, but any value that we set did not go thru (gpio stay 0, despite being, and no voltage coming out. There is also one board that we can toggle the pin. However, we didn't want this to stop us from becoming more familiar with embedded systems.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Actually turning a "no" project, to a "yes" project. We were able to overcome the challenges that we faced with the DragonBoard and deployed our app to it to allow us to demo to everyone at the cmd-f hackathon.

What's next for tomodatchi

Include more sensory actions such as using light, temperature, voice commands, and also a working facial emotion recognition. A variety of pets that users can choose from to take care of would also be something we would like to offer.