Empathy Suit

The Empathy Suit is a full-body suit (neck to feet) that can communicate bodily sensations between people. The first version of the Empathy Suit will be able to detect, record, and produce pressure across one’s body.

Illustration of Empathy Suit

The “brain” of the Empathy Suit will be an Adafruit FLORA (or similar microcontroller) along with a Bluetooth LE module to communicate with the user’s smartphone. Each subunit of the Empathy Suit, dedicated to detecting/producing pressure on a specific region of the body, will consist of a square FSR (to detect pressure) and a mini vibrating motor (to produce pressure). A soft circuit across the suit will connect all the subunits to the microcontroller.

Empathy Network push notification example

Accompanying the Empathy Suit is the Empathy Network, a mobile social network that lets you track and follow other people’s bodies, as well as share recorded “body memories.”

Mirror to Society

Mirror to Society, an iteration of our midterm project, the Judgmental Pumpkin, is a mirror that reveals how the world perceives you, in real time. A neural network is trained on a large dataset of Instagram posts and learns how to describe people with adjectives. When the user steps in front of the mirror, the adjectives that best describe the user will start flying on an LED display positioned around the mirror.

To create the judgment algorithm, a convolutional neural network (CNN) will be trained on millions of Instagram posts that contain adjectives associated with personality traits. After training, the network will be able to calculate the probability that a given input image is associated with any given adjective.

The mirror, which will run on a Raspberry Pi and a webcam, will detect when a person has stepped in front of it and query a remote server running the network, which will respond with the activations of the network for the user’s image. The adjectives associated with the top activations will then be displayed on the mirror.

Even though I would eventually like to realize this project, it is a very software-heavy and not particularly hardware-heavy one, so it’s not a great fit for this class (and it wouldn’t push me out of my comfort zone as much as the Empathy Suit).