Our biggest inspiration came from our grandparents, who often felt lonely and struggled to find help. Specifically, one of us has a grandpa with dementia. He lives alone and finds it hard to receive help since most of his relatives live far away, and he has reduced motor skills. Knowing this, we were determined to create a product — and a friend — that would be able to help the elderly with their health while also being fun to be around! Ted makes this dream a reality, transforming lives and promoting better welfare.
Ted is able to:
- 🐻 Be a little cutie pie
- 🎤 Chat with users: Features reactive movements based on conversation (e.g., waves at you when greeting, idle bobbing).
- ❤️ Monitor health: Reads heart rate, determines health levels, and provides help accordingly.
- 🚗 Drive autonomously: Uses an RC car base to drive toward a person in need, utilizing object detection and speech recognition.
- 🕺 Dance to Michael Jackson: Because why not?
- Materials: Popsicle sticks, cardboard, tons of hot glue (and some sacrifice of our fingers 🩹).
- Tech Stack:
- Play.HT and Claude 3.5 Sonnet
- YOLOv8
- AssemblyAI
- Selenium
- Arduino, servos, and sound sensors for direction detection
- Material Limitations: Securing every part was tricky with limited materials. Components often shifted or moved during test runs, leading to frustration. We overcame this by experimenting with new methods of securing parts, eventually finding a reliable solution.
- Speech-to-Text Conflicts: Running two speech-to-text models simultaneously caused issues we’re still working on.
- Reactive Movements: Designing realistic and fluid movements was tough, but we achieved it through keyword detection and a detailed list of preset actions.
- 🎉 Fluid head and arm movements of Ted.
- 🎨 A very pretty design for the RC car and poster board.
- ⚡ Snappy response times with a realistic voice.
- 💪 The power of friendship (and teamwork!).
- 🌟 Don’t be afraid to try new things!
- Integrating more features to enhance Ted's ability to aid people’s needs:
- Example: Adding the ability to measure blood pressure.