Hi there.
Here’s the Arduino works this week.
For my final project, I have three ideas work with Arduino:
1) Heavy-unfriendly Pad
The sitting pad with different color LED lights. The color of light depends on the weight of the person. For example, a man weighs 80kg, sits on the pad then the red-light up; a woman of 50kg, sits down the yellow light-up. It is a fun way to encourage heavy / fat people to stand up and do excise. The scenario would be subway cable, office, Pub, etc.
2) Timer for Brushing Teeth
Inspired by the interview of design in Design Research class, a doctor’s opinion on oral health for us was that we should brush our teeth for at least 2 minutes and twice a day. So I want to design a 2-min-timer, only for brushing teeth and visualize the time not only shows the number but the change of different colors to encourage people to brush at least 2 minutes every day.
3) Moolody
This project may be too ambitious. The idea is from the product I designed in Affirming Artifacts. I want to make a installation for tracking/recording user’s everyday mood in terms of musical notes. then, after a period of time, for example, a month, user can touch the small balls to play his/her mood-melody physically.
Great brainstorm, Yangying! I think your second idea has the most promise– a device that makes it entertaining to brush your teeth for 2 minutes sounds fun. Have you researched current methods that exist for this problem? I encourage you to look up a bunch of different electric toothbrush models as research. How would your output make the user want to keep brushing till the end? My toothbrush stays on for 2 minutes, but sometimes I turn it off early if i’m bored or in a hurry.
Your first idea for public space fat-shaming is pretty insensitive, to be honest– heavy folks are already reminded of their size constantly. If your goal is to get folks to exercise, how else could you facilitate that encouragement in a positive way, or more private space?
While your mood-music idea doesn’t sound /that/ hard to prototype, I’m concerned you’d be disappointed with the results. Do you have a background in music? This semi-random data won’t necessarily sound meaningful when you play it back, and I worry the timescale of the month-long tracking doesn’t really work with the scope of the rest of the class, making the testing data even less meaningful.
Thank you, Becky!
I will do some research on existing electronic toothbrushes or related products for that. The idea is to make tooth brushing more fun for everyone so that people could take good care of their oral health.