Tech Progress In the last week, we added a calibration and tinkered with the way our accelerometer gathers data. Both these actions are part of our mission to make sleepy more universal and the process of it imitating the user's breath better and smoother.
Our main struggle is the fact that we need to find the right balance between making the sensor very sensitive, yet avoiding the noise that the sensitivity adds to the data reading. So we are actually battling to find the balance between both, knowing that if we succeed in creating a more stable reading that we can convert into light. our plan ahead is to keep working on these efforts and develop a minimal device to allow us to start testing our vision of Sleepy on users.
Our demo:
Speed Mentoring Summery
- Interesting questions regarding the interaction with Sleepy were raised. Questions such as how does the user know how to turn the regular light on and off and how to start the sampling mode? How does the user know that he can place Sleepy in a lying position and not only in a standing position? (Maybe some kind of a different texture so the user can feel it in the dark).
- Making the change from follower to leader seamless/unconscious. That way, the user doesn't need to "work", Sleepy does the "work" for him.
- Recommended process of follower to leader: The light will start at the user's pace (follower) and then lower itself by a very small percentage every time (leader), constantly measuring and seeing that the user is succeeding in breathing to the slower rhythm. It makes the whole experience more pleasant, accurate and fun than to instruct the user how to breath to a certain pace consciously.
- Things that need to be checked via user testing, such as the right pace for the leader phase, brightness of light, color etc...
Due to the fact that we are still unable to go to the lab or meet, we had to think of a solution on how to start the user testing process with actual lights, even though we don't have the tech at home. We were anticipating starting the user testing combined with lighting but it took time to start since only Shir and Elad received tech kits as part of their IoT course. Luckily we learned a way via PowerPoint to test the different light options for multiple interactions. Also, we were able to get extra kits, so all remaining group members could build a basic model with a LED light and a potentiometer in order to get the user testing going. Using the instructions via Zoom from our tech members, we were able to get it going and start gaining some insights from our users.
