CareCam

Every day, hundreds of parents experience the miracle of birth, unbeknownst the challenges they are about to face. One of these daily challenges includes soothing the child, which CareCam helps parents do! This product is a baby monitor that detects the facial expressions of the child and helps soothe him or her by playing sounds that babies like. Our inspiration stems from assisting parents with transitioning into parenthood and making their lives a little more at ease. All those sleepless nights, crying fits, and working from home problems will be reduced with CareCam, as our goal is to better the quality of life for parents and their children.

While working on this project, we learned how to start building a website with Flask, along with some simple HTML and CSS commands which gave us a pretty good start to learn web programming. We can transfer some of these skills to build our own personal websites in the future. In addition, our team members that are new to DubHacks also learned what an API is and how useful it can be to help build projects.

The core of the project was built on a python script utilizing google's Vision API and Firebase Cloud Storage. The script would read input from a webcam, parsing the video into individual images, sending those images to the Vision model to detect emotions. Upon detection of surprise (likely/very_likely), the script would invoke a call to our Firebase Storage bucket where we have prerecorded audio files uploaded through our android app.

The android app is built on Java and is designed to record three separate audio files to be played by the CareCam. Once recorded, the files will similarly be uploaded to Firebase Storage to be stored.

Some challenges we faced were:

Insufficient hardware to connect to raspberry pi, which was the original implementation platform.
Working in a new team where 3 members had never participated in a hackathon.
Exploring new API and technologies (Vision, Firebase Cloud, Cloud Storage, Android Studios, Flask)