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Inspiration

As students who frequently study computer science, computer engineering, and business, we find ourselves spending long hours in front of a computer screen. We often the negative strain placed on our posture and eyesight, so we decided to build a website application that helps students and working professionals become conscientious of fixing this issue.

What it does

The website monitors the user's posture and its main function is to send a music alert if poor posture is detected. Every time the application is opened before a study session begins, the user calibrates their posture, allowing the application to use this as the standard for good posture over the course of the study period. Finally, posture exercises and tips are featured for users.

How we built it

Using face tracking technology, we recorded the relative positions of a person when they are slouching and when they are sitting up right. Our app finds the difference in their head position, and if it crosses a certain threshold, it can be interpreted as a slouch. Once the user slouches for three seconds, an alarm goes off alerting them to stop, and sit up straight back to their "ideal" position. The user interface was built with HTML and CSS and the logic was handled using JavaScript alongside with P5.js.

Challenges we ran into

We originally intended to build a Chrome extension, but realized we wanted to enhance the user's experience with our piece of technology by "humanizing" the experience. To do just that, a web application allows us to interact with the user through multiple interfaces.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Knowing little about the software, we were able to research and implement face-tracking technology, backed up by a custom algorithm that accounts for the nature of user behaviour in front of computers. We are proud that we were also able to simplify user navigation and enhance user experience, all in the short time span of 24 hours.

What's next for align

By making a web application, the product would have greater scalability. We plan to develop a wider range of functions in the future as we acquired more users, such as a voice component to the personal assistant, providing guided posture exercise sessions, and allowing user customizations. With these added functions, we will be able to transition to a freemium pricing model. Additionally, we hope to transition to a desktop application so that users can create an account with align for data tracking, which can be communicated to the user through timeline graphs of progress.

Built With

• bootstrap
• css3
• html5
• javascript
• object-tracking
• p5.js