Facial Response Tracker

The customized message
The gifs

Inspiration

As we become more attached to our machines, our ability to become isolated and depressed grows. When our team saw the power of Microsoft's emotion API, we saw an opportunity to fight that trend.

What it does

Our app presents the user with several funny gifs. After a second or two of display, we take a picture of the user's face and send it to Microsoft's API to gauge their response. By gathering this data over time, we can alert users when they begin to react less and less to originally amusing things, which could indicate mild depression.

How we built it

The app is composed of an express server and a mongodb backend. The pictures are taken on any built-in webcam.

Challenges we ran into

Browsers understandably make it very hard for websites to access computer hardware. It took many iterations, but we eventually found an approach that works for all platforms we've tested.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team of mostly newbies, we're extremely proud of how we pulled together and built something significant out of technologies we'd never worked with before.

What we learned

From Git to Express, our whole team worked with new and interesting technologies. We learned a lot about programming and collaborative coding.

What's next for Facial Response Tracker

The gifs need to be classified and some universal metrics need to be calculated. Measuring an individual's response only against their own history is prone to random fluctuation in short term moods and the quality of the gifs. We would also like to implement a feature that presents easy access to mental health resources to all and a community component that allows friends to support each other.