Appraisal Process Review

This week we did the team appraisal. Our team critique Team X. I love their concept. They are using the digital carpet to encourage and enhance people to do the exercise. They use lights and music to achieve their goal. The prolonged pressure causing a melody which is different from a short pressure is impressed me, and the prolonged pressure represents stretching. I do love that idea. The way we use to give the appraisal and receive feedbacks through Miro is pretty cool and really efficient.

Feedback Reflection

There are 3 comments for my concept. I conclude the main problems that I need to consider and the reflections.

• Would like to see the judgment of the words/showing "bad words" being detected

Reflection: I am going to figure out the keywords recognition functions with a database in the next step. Plan A is to color the "bad words" in the transcription of the sentence. Plan B is to show the "bad words" only on the screen.

• Positive feedback should be added. / Interactions to adjust users' emotions should be added

Reflection: The color of the petal will change once the expression is done. So I am going to use the Arduino to let the LEDs change between red and green to give positive and negative feedbacks for users. The way to change the petal's color from red to green is to pluck the red petal and express the negative feelings, then put it back. Hoping this process can achieve emotion adjustment.

• Handle more than one user at the same time can be a problem.

Reflection: If users are not talking to each other, there is not a conversation, the LOME will detect the words by the nearest people. For example, we already have set the sensitivity of the sound sensor, which means if the sensitivity is not that high, the LOME will not detect all the words from all the people in the same space. In this case, we are no going to separate the sound resources since we believe it can be an environment monitor and every family member should be count as a team. So if users are having a conversation, the situation is the same actually. No matter who said the "bad words", the LOME will notify them, and the red petal showing can encourage them to supervise each other.

• MIssing a part of the goal of the project.

Reflection: This comment really let me think over my project again. The end goal of our project is helping people relieve stress, manage emotions, and maintain positive family functioning. When I was doing the prototype, it was easy to miss the problem fixing process. Maybe because of the technical difficulties, I turned my attention to how to solve the problem, ignoring the original purpose of the feature. This comment made me realize that every time I made a change, I should reflect on how it fits the purpose I was trying to achieve. Trying to solve the problem from this perspective doesn't get me stuck in a technical problem that may not be completely necessary.

Gap Filling

From the appraisal, the incompletion of the project is ensured. I did some research about ways to release sadness. Traveling in nature, listening to music, eating foods, and so on, plenty of ways to relieve negative emotions. But none of them can be used in the project, except music playing. Playing music is quite plain since it can be achieved by variable mobile devices, like a smartphone, speaker, MP3, MP4, and so on.

Fortunately, I remembered that one of my friends share her campus experience in the U.S. with me that the campus gave them a lot of toys for decompression. They come in a variety of shapes and can be squeezed to release pressure.

I realized that in the original design, LOME's petals were hollow, and LEDs would be installed in the middle. If squeezable was used as an additional function of the petals, the entire project would not be greatly affected while being perfected.

This is what I plan to build.