Echo | Devpost

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💭Inspiration💭

Today's world has amazingly strong healthcare and medical research. Despite the heavy research and immense efforts from people all over the world, cognitive diseases such as Alzheimer's, which negatively impact memory, still pose a great problem because they cannot be cured. The most we can do now is treat symptoms, but that does not fix one's memory, nor give them any old memories back.

We, the team behind Echo, recognize this issue, and strive to better the lives of people with memory loss all over the world.

Both Anton and Yair have family members that suffer from dementia from Alzheimer's and/or other medical conditions, which makes their lives much harder. For example, they have trouble remembering from daily tasks to the names and faces of people, even relatives. The fact that there are so many people who suffer from memory loss, and that there is no way to recover those , further amplified by personal experience, has inspired Echo

🤔What it does🤔

Echo uses a camera to record activities during the day, and uses AI to process what is happening and when. Echo allows the user to review what happened during the day from their perspective - this can be used to remind the user of where they were, what they did, and what they still need to do.

🔨How we built it🔨

Built with: python, javascript
Libraries used: PyAudio, MoviePy, Next.js, OpenCV, SciKit
APIs and Datasets: Cohere, Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP)
Other systems/extensions: OpenAI Whisper, Google Cloud

💪Challenges we ran into💪

Slow rendering due to unoptimized hardware
AI had trouble identifying key info
Library dependency and API access issues

🏆Accomplishments that we are proud of🏆

We are proud that we were able to achieve our original goal with the application. Since this is our first time working with so many APIs and libraries and mashing them all together along with an AI model, we found that building this was very challenging, especially in a time crunch. We hadThe difficulty made this project even more satisfying to complete.

Furthermore, we take pride in the fact that we created an original solution (albeit not perfect) to a real world problem that affects many people. By extension, we are proud of the potential of positive impact that this project has on the future. Making such a project further ingrains within us the idea that innovative technology can and should be used to help the world, whether it helps society as a whole, or individuals within it. We believe Echo is just one step of many in using new technology to support and create a better future.

🎓What we learned🎓

First, while working on the project, we researched to learn more about Alzheimer's and memory loss, as well as prosopagnosia. We learned some statistics, such as there are an estimated 55 million people with dementia in the world (WHO), which further encouraged us to create this.
Second, through the development process, we also learned/taught ourselves how to properly integrate certain libraries and APIs cohesively in a program.
Lastly, the importance of good teamwork and chemistry was emphasized in the creation of this project. We constantly worked together, communicating to each other what we were doing and what needed to be done next. We complemented each other's skills very well. As a result, we achieved far more than either of us could alone. All in all, participating in this hackathon was another great learning experience for us.

🔜What's next for Echo🔜

Despite having achieved what we initially wanted, there is still more to do:

The processing for Echo will be optimized, so that it can take less resources and run more efficiently.
Echo will be able to help users navigate, like google maps
Echo will be released as an executable application.
Echo will be paired with its own glasses/headset instead of a webcam strapped to a hat.