Outcome

Intention

Write about the big ideas behind your project? What are the goals? Why did you make it? What are your motivations?

This project is to improve the mental health of people who recently went through a breakup from a toxic relationship. Psychological research has shown that people who suffered from a toxic relationship tend to be conditioned to return to the toxicity and that having a strong support network is highly important in order to prevent further damages.

This stress ball helps users to stay connected with the support network at all time in a non-invasive, hassle-free manner. 

Goal

You should be able to clearly what kind of solution are you trying to create and why? How does it address the problem. Explain in as few words as possible.

Breakup puts one in a highly stressed and mentally vulnerable state. The emotional ups and downs haunt the person at any time of the day, during work time, social time, etc. However, it is difficult for one to connect with the support group and share the emotional downs all the time. With Support Ball, the users can simply use the stress ball to physically destress and also inform the support network of their emotional state.

Process

Outline your approach to the project? What ideas did you generate and how did you refine or reject them? What did you research and explore? what were the design choices? What challenges were encountered and how did you resolve them?

The process started with working with the pressure sensor. I thought of incorporating other sensors to improve the input, such as a flex sensor. However, after research and consulting with a teaching assistant, I came to the conclusion that adding another sensor would not add enough values. Instead, I decided to add a push button that would allow the users to turn off the stress ball so that it wouldn't be activated by accident and allow users to disconnect with the support group when they want to.

The entire process was a challenge to me, as I had no experience working with circuits and programming. Adding a pushbutton to the right location, programming it to create the function I am envisioning, connecting this with IFTTT to send messages, everything was a new experience and a challenge. In order to resolve this, I studied the resources available on the course website and other online materials. I asked for help from people who are experienced as well.

Outcome

Detail what you created. Explain how complete the prototypes is and how it works.  Include images, code and/or video.

The prototype has a pressure sensor, LED light, a pushdown button, and it connects to the IFTTT. When the pushdown button is on and the pressure sensor is activated, the LED light turns on, triggering the SMS message to be sent out to the previously given phone number. Ideally, it was supposed to send out a SMS messages, but while I was testing out this feature I used up the maximum 100 messages for this week. I had to switch it to send out an email instead of a text message. This has about 5-minute latency, so due to this unexpected change, it has a temporary delay in notifying.

Next Steps

What would you do if you took this project forward and why? 

Next steps for this project would be as below.

1) Send SMS instead of emails to gain immediate, real-time notification.

2) Figure out a way for the pressure sensor to be remote from the breadboard so that all the components are hidden inside the stress ball.

Reflection

Reflect on the challenges you encountered and the process as a whole. Did you get where you wanted to? If so, great. If not, why not? What do you need to get there, etc?

I did not get where I wanted to. It was confusing why certain things weren't working or what I have done wrong. I would have wanted more time to study this further and build this knowing what I am exactly doing. 

References and Acknowledgements

Cite any sources, precedents or code that you've used as part of this project or have informed the outcome. References should be integrated into the text above.