Iteration 5 - Lock In Brainstorm - Eric Butler

 

HRV Iteration 5 - Lock In Brainstorm

During this iteration, we would start to discuss and brainstorm different ideas to make each and every person's project unique. This involved gathering around and sharing different ideas of what projects each person could design that would incorporate a software/hardware piece as well as an MQTT down and up for each person. This is vital as it would test each student's knowledge individually on the content covered in the module.

Stream Ideas

During this discussion, we went around the table and talked about ideas first related to our streams and how we could use what we already know from those and apply MQTT to each one. Some examples of this included looking into possibly operating a vehicle 'Control Area Network' (CAN) bus and how we can apply a microbit with MQTT and IFTTT functionality to it. This idea was quickly extinguished as gaining access to a CAN bus physically or even through a simulator requires specific software and tools which although we have access to them, Have their own ecosystem that it would be a lot of work to find a workaround to even try to access this.

 

 Some other discussions were had in terms of integrating cloud computing to try and incorporate their knowledge into it but it was found out that some of their content was already being covered within the process of setting the MQTT server with communicating through the cloud with JSON strings as well as other aspects. At this point, it was clear that we were going to have to revisit this the next day and so we did.

Group Ideas

In the next class, we really started to make some progress on what were going to do and we went back to the idea that we could make this a group project. Although there were some questions about how we were going to make a group project work, we did a brainstorm and came up with different ideas we found interesting. We brainstormed as a group, adding innovations to each other's ideas and discussing the best course of action for the two projects we were going to develop. The project we decided on was a wave machine that would imitate waves crashing; depending on your HRV, would see a light or heavy crash.

 As well as this, we decided that we liked the idea of a mother having a teddy bear that could see a child's HRV. How this would work is that we could build a wearable that a child could wear the would include a sensor in it to track the child's HRV, the wearable would send the values of the HRV to an MQTT server and then to a Microbit running Beebotte that would be wired to the teddy, depending on the HRV of the child, would activate a motor inside the teddy and so the teddy would breathe to the child's HRV. As well as this, we could install a button to act as a pacer.

Brainstorm

Here I will include the screenshots taken during the brainstorming class and go through some details on what some points mean as well as the thought process of each section as it was being discussed during the class. Due to the size of the board, to improve the clarity of the photo, I'll include each section of the board below.

Left side of white board

In the screenshot above, we are discussing the up and down section of the project meaning what IFTTT functionality we can use to operate our system. Some of the features we discussed were:

    > MQTT Client for both down and up: This would be a requirement as this would be our main communication point between the client and the server. It operates by connecting microbits to a cloud board and sending values over radio signals to interact between different devices.

    > Twitter Hashtags: We discussed the possibility that we could interact with Twitter and create a hashtag e.g. #LetsBreathe where at a certain time or when someone decides to tweet with the hashtag, we can get a notification that tells us to do something like a breathing exercise or showing a pacer as a reminder to do your daily breathing exercise.

    > WhatsApp: Similar to the Twitter hashtag, we also looked into possibly making a WhatsApp group where we can all message in to operate a breathing exercise, We liked this more then twitter as a lot more people have WhatApp and so it would be not only more private then a twitter hashtag but also more accessible. Although this idea seemed very good in practice, we quickly scratched it after finding out the security issues behind it.

    > Calander:  The other main concept were discussed was about having a reminder on your calandar that would trigger a breathing exercise and the same time each day. This would be something very useful as breathing exercises can often be forgotten and so setting a time each day that will trigger a reminder will only bring consistency and improvements to your breathing.

Middle of white board

In the middle of the board, Jason drew up a diagram of the theory behind what we are looking for, which is HRV. This diagram represents the difference between Heart Rate & HRV (Heart Rate Variablity). It step diagram on the bottom shows the time between breathing in and breathing out relative to what a pacer could look like for example box breathing which is 4 in - hold for 4 - 4 out. This type of technique is used by alot of people throughout the world such as athletes to people who could be training for the military. We will see more of this within our lock-in (development) section.

Right Side of white board

On the right side of the board, we worked out what exactly we would try achieve with both the teddy and the wave machine. Here we are mapping out how our teddy will interact with the MQTT server and then to the microbit. The same for the wave machine. We are also numbering each step in terms of importance. #1 being what we do first, #2 being what we do second, etc... This will be explained more in the 'Lock-In' report.

Miro-board

Lastly, as part of the brainstorm we created a Miro-board to better structure out the brainstorm and to have a place where the brainstorm could be saved. This would become vital for the Lock- In as we would use this to apply rules to each person and we can decide on jobs.

Conclusion

To conclude this report, Brainstorming helped alot with not only deciding what we wanted to do but being able to put our skills throughout our different streams into words and ideas. It was definitely a learning exercise for all of us and acted as a way of building up communication skills that we can use once part of teams in industry. Some things I may have glanced over, I will be sure to cover the basis of in the Lock-In report. In the report I will cover the process of taking this brainstorm and working with it to develope an IoT app. I will split this up into each day and give a run down of what happened of the course of the two day Lock-In