What have I done

1. Setting the plan

By discussing with teammates, my part of work is to build the prototype of the 'boundary“ function, which was my focus from the previous study. The next step was to scope the function and decide to which step I will build, and to which step I need to simulate.

The "boundary" function is used to welcome the user home. It is to set a clear boundary between work to study life outside and the family life, which helps to prevent the user from bringing the external negative emotion into the family. Mixing up the emotion happened outside and inside the family can cause unnecessary conflict due to the inappropriate communication method. With this feature, LOME can give an initial evaluation of each user’s emotion after their work/study experience outside and set an indicator for the user him/herself and other family members to realize.

1. Research about the solution

For this week, I did much amount of research about what's the best platform or method to build the prototype. The key point of my part of work is to let the Arduino responded to voice. To realize the voice recognition, I studied different platforms and languages such as Unity and Python, also the API which can be called. It is still in progress but I found that Google API highly matched what I need, and using unity to call the voice recognition feature which built-in with PC system is also effective.

The next step

Next step I need to do more brainstorm about how I can realize the simulated function through Arduino which can be physically interacted with on a certain standard. The simulation has to be highly matched with the actual function which can make sure the testing of the prototype can provide useful and high-quality feedback on the future developing. Also, the interaction method has to be same or similar to the real one which gives me the foundation that I can later build on for the final delivery.