Calmyo

Preventing Anxiety as it happens

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Inspiration

After talking to some faculty, we learned that anxiety is something that a lot of people suffer from and we felt that it would be interesting to see something created that could help relieve one of such stress. We wanted to explore the idea more in depth and looked for ways anxiety plays a role in our lives. Specifically, we looked at how internet articles, nowadays, are responsible for a lot of the stress we experience.

And this was the point in our project where we knew we wanted to dive in. Preventing Stress and anxiety attacks induced by viewing taxing internet articles became our mission.

We identified a few problems that helped shape our project:

We do not have a way to stop anxiety in live time as it happens. Sometimes, we don’t even realize that we are experiencing anxiety 40 million Americans (18 and over) suffer from anxiety disorders (https://www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics) We spend more than $42 million on treating anxiety disorders every year (https://www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics) These disorders are highly treatable, but only ⅓ seek treatment (https://www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics)

What it does

Calmyo uses the Myo band to detect user muscle tension via EMG signals. These signals, then, trigger a Chrome extension that injects itself into the current web page in order to cover it up with an iframe. The purpose of covering such a page was to have the user stop in the moment and take the time to stop that ongoing anxiety that was occurring at the moment. The extension, then, initiates a breathing exercise which is based off of the 4x4 Navy Seal breathing exercises that is used to calm one down immediately. (http://motto.time.com/4316151/breathing-technique-navy-seal-calm-focused/).

How we built it

We started with the idea of integrating Myo because we were interested in the sensors within the hardware. We wanted to explore the idea of using them to detect EMG signals and use them to cause our extension to open up when one was anxious. We used the Myo band to detect these signals using the Myo SDK and we made a corresponding Chrome extension using Node.js, Animate.css, and jQuery that is triggered by anxiety (aka elevated EMG signals) picked up by the Myo device. We, then, used Adobe Illustrator and After Effects to visualize the breathing exercises and to create the logo. HTML5 & CSS3 were used for the frontend part of our extension. We also used open source wave music in our extension for a more calming effect.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, we had planned to introduce our idea as an iOS app, but the Apple developer ID was causing us problems late in the wee hours, so we quickly went for the next best thing and switched to a Chrome extension. Moreover, we wanted to integrate a heart sensor into the project, but we were unable to do so due to lack of hardware and compatibility with the Myo band. We also needed to understand the physiological process that occurs during an anxiety attack as well as the role that EMG signals play in these processes. In order to get a sense of what we heading into, we conducted extensive research through the power PubMed, a Medical database, that was able to provide us with a greater understanding of how the fight or flight process works. Moreover, we needed to know what the threshold of the EMG signals should be in order to trigger the activation of the Chrome extension. We learned that the amplitude of EMG is “random in nature” and that it is usually somewhere between 0 to 20 Hz (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1455479/). This, then, allowed us to do some user testing in order to figure the threshold for EMG that would activate our Chrome extension. We set our threshold to 50 Hz for a period of 20 iterations. Ideally, we would have liked to calibrate the threshold according to each user, but we were unable to figure out how to do that.

One of the biggest issues we did run into was the inability to visualize stress levels because we were unable to connect our script to get EMG data from the Myo band in order to relay that information to our frontend. All in all, we plan on working through these issues because this was a cool idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we’re very proud of is being able to navigate through difficult hardware and code as well as being able to read through dense medical documents that we were not familiar with. We became biomedical engineers in the process for a day and learned how anxiety works and the ways we could detect it.

What we learned

Myo Band, JavaScript, How to make Chrome Extension, Connecting the artistic aspects of After Effects with technological practicality

What's next for Calmyo

In the future, we hope to develop iOS and Android apps for this project. We would also like to have a custom calibration feature that would adjust the threshold for EMG for any user because through testing, we found that anxiety is displayed in people differently. It would also be great to have data analytics and graphs that could display anxiety and stress levels.

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