For the first week, our team started to brainstorm our ideas around hardware and software projects that might be appropriate for this capstone course. After a few round of brainstorming, ideation, and voting, we proposed three initial ideas as following:

NecX

Neck is one such part of our body which densely packs tons of information. It is the neural pass of the body, it can move, it can give vocal data, it can provide heart rate information, etc. We envision a device which can tap on this information and result in novel input technique while it can also keeping a track on health. The interaction can be fast enough as compared to that of a smartphone, with faster in and faster out. We envision small basic gestures and not a full blown interface. The device will connect to the phone. Haptic feedback can be given to the user. It can take many forms, such by being part of the clothing collar or in a form of a pendant. The neck interactions might not be as socially awkward as by other wearables in the market.

Glass

Although technologies have made significant progresses in car safety, current car system is inadequate to assist the drivers to deal with all situations that may hazard their lives. For example, driving on a highway with the direct sunlight to the windscreen can be extremely crucial. In such situation, the sunglasses would not help at all as it not only dims the sunlight, but also darkens the surrounding environment. In turn, drivers usually slow their car speed dramatically, which leaves almost no time for the cars behind them to react and may cause serious accidents. We therefore propose to design a wearable device for this. The basic idea is to build glasses that can capture this sudden changes in light and helps the drivers staying in land with the need of slowing their speed dramatically.

Air Quality

The Air we breath in directly affects our health, more so in children. There are tons of devices out there in the market which measure and control Air quality indoors. But, we are always moving. We are not always in our living room, bedroom or in our office space. From secondary research done in one of our earlier projects, it was evident that there is a need for a personal Air quality device, which measures and protects an individual from harmful pollutants. These measurements can be collected and crowdsourced with location data to get accurate pollution levels in a city. This data can be further put to use, for example to give routing information with the least amount of pollutants (this can be crucial for people suffering with asthma and other diseases). The system will not only be beneficial for personal use but also can suggest preventive mechanisms to the city government.

We also came up with some other interesting ideas that we have to removed them from our list due to the constraints in this course. But we are happy to share these ideas here and we may work on them in the future. ;)

Microwave

“How many seconds should I heat my milk when using the microwave oven?” When one needs to prepare his/her food using a microwave oven, it is always the first question to ask. From the user perspective, it may be an incorrect design - we care how hot (i.e., the temperatures) the food should be prepared, not the time. Therefore, we propose to design a SMART microwave oven that allows users to control the microwave oven by setting the food temperature instead of timer. We would also like to explore the heat map inside the microwave oven when it is being used. The assumption is that the oven does not heat the space uniformly. By knowing this 3D spectrum, the user can be more aware of how the food is prepared in the microwave oven.

Automatic Car Seat Heater System

We propose to design an automatic car seat heater system, which can automatically turning on/off the car seat heater based on the demand of the person sitting down. There are three inputs for the whole system, which are user’s physical weight collected by smartphone app by user input, actual weight collected by pressure sensor located at top of seat, and temperature inside the car collected by built-in system for car.

Based on the difference of two weights, the actual amount of clothes worn by the user can be calculated. With joint of the environment temperature of the car and clothes worn by the user, the system can decide the heating time for the car seat heater system, and sending the digital signal to whether turning on or off the heating system. This digital signal can be embedded with the heating system inside car, and control the seat heater automatically.