TransHOMErs International: Creating affordable and sustainable living
By Sophie M, Maya S, Alexa J, Zuzanna P, Sreenidhi V and Františka Š
Brief Overview:
What we are focusing on and why
While brainstorming on this project we decided to focus on six aspects:
Sustainibility
Innovation
Cost Efficiency
User-friendliness
Technicalities
Comfort
Our proposed solution is to create a system containing the flexible and sustainable Smart Home model, and an app that summarises the user’s habits and daily patterns to provide useful data to help improve our lifestyle. Weekly summaries would include details about the following: sleep patterns, eating habits, water intake, fitness, mental health, water and electricity usage, air quality and money spent.The model would also be equipped with security systems and will be adaptable to different geographic regions.
We believe that a Smart Home should allow sustainable living to be the easiest option for it’s user - while also encouraging users to be mentally and physically fit using key features of it’s design. This Smart Home model is a crossover between technology and natural solutions to decrease carbon footprint, etc.
Solutions we developed:
The Problem:
Nowadays, with the fast life we lead, it is easy to neglect our health, there is no time to make sure that our body is totally fine, or that we are eating and making enough exercise. Which results in many people having diseases problems due to sedentary lifestyle, such as obesity, or even depression.
Innovation
Technicalities
Defining the Problem:
“Nowadays, with the fast life we lead, it is easy to neglect our health, there is no time to make sure that our body is totally fine, or that we are eating and making enough exercise. Which results in many people having diseases problems due to sedentary lifestyle, such as obesity, or even depression.”
Given statement comes from our project page. By those words we want to say that in today’s world our lives are full of work and duties, therefore it’s easy to forget about our mental and physical health. That’s where our home design steps in. We want to make sure that home we designed will help with those struggles by using different technologies which will ensure the health and sanity of a home user.
Our Hypothesis:
In order to lead a balanced and healthy lifestyle, first we need to know how to do so. In today’s world there are many ways to find out what one can do to improve their health, but the thing is - they all take time. We also need to realize what we are doing wrong to change our habits. Therefore, we wanted to test the accuracy of the given statement: A system that collects all the data from our daily life and summarizes it weekly will make us realize our habits and improve our lifestyle. This will allow us to make informed decisions about our health.
Technicalities
Comfort
User-friendliness
Innovation
Sustainibility
Our Data Collection:
We collected data by sending out Google forms in all 6 of the countries we live in: India, China, USA, Ecuador, Czech Republic and Poland. The questions we asked included ones regarding the type of smart products people use at home, what potential they saw in naturally sustainable products, their perception of technology and how practical and affordable they thought our model was.
Innovation
Technicalities
Sustainable Living:
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:
82% - refers to the number of people who took our survey who fully support this idea
The point of our Smart Home is to meet the basic needs of the user - water, food, electricity and security, while also achieving them in a sustainable manner.
Limitations imposed by technology would include the Natural-Hazard Location based warning system as it is impossible to always predict the occurence of natural disasters
Technicalities
Sustainibility
Innovation
Comfort
Cost Efficiency
User-friendliness
Physical Health:
The idea of this system is one that gives you all the data of your life and encourages you to make an informed decision with it. It also uses a reward system - if you exercise 4-5 times every week, depending on the goals you set, the app will reward you points that can be collected to earn freebies like football game tickets.
User-friendliness
Sustainibility
Technicalities
Innovation
Mental Health:
We want to add a feature that is similar to moodfit on our TransHELPers application.
The following will be the aspects of this feature:
Innovation
Technicalities
Cost Efficiency
User-friendliness
Prototyping:
User-friendliness
Innovation
Physical Safety and Cyber Security:
With a mobile app, it is important to take into consideration the cyber and physical safety aspects of the users. Cybersecurity considerations will be put in place, including but not limited to the encryption of genetic and personal data through the use of sophisticated encryption systems
such as RSA encryption or gene and data lockers that will give users the peace of mind that their personal information is not up for public view for malicious hackers.
Our app:
Each member of the family will have this app in their cellphones. This system will work as a lifestyle tracker: it Will measure how much time you have moved or worked out each day, how much time you sleep per day, how many calories you eat, and your vital signs (body temperature, blood pressure, breathing rate). All this data will be collected by the multiple devices in each room of the house, and the cellphone. At the end of the day, a summarize of your health will be given, and at the end of the week, there will be another summarize, in which will be included an analysis of your how your habits affects your daily life and how and improve them.
Cost of initial purchase + maintenance:
In the interest of public health, we hope to keep the cost of utilizing our equipment as well as our app at a minimum. Our chat screen to talk to doctors on-call will be allowed for use at a nominal fee of $2 for every 10 minutes, much cheaper than what one would be expected to pay when visiting a traditional health checkup center without a medical insurance.
While most of the equipment comes with an upfront payment fee, the cost of maintenance will also be nominal and we hope to offer it on an insurance guarantee for a low fee of $15 a year.
Potential of Solution and Feasibility:
We believe that the solutions we developed can have a significant impact on both the single users’ life and the environment as well. Some of the inventions we wrote about already existed, so for sure it won’t be hard to use them in a daily life, so we were concentrated on interfacing them with the users’ app. We also came up with some new ideas, for example the “domestic violence alert“ or the use of dehumidifiers for asthmatics. As we can see in the results of our polls, people would be interested in our models, so we hope, in the future, when we have a more datas and resources, we will be able to create some prototypes.
Analysis of Issues with our Model:
STRENGTHS
WEAKNESSES
Summary:
In our work, we tried to cover up a lot of different aspects of how the modern and sustainable living should look like and what should be in it. We were mostly oriented on younger people, as we think, that it is easier for them to use some of the newest technologies. Each of us was doing a different part of the project, but we did well in summarizing all our ideas together and putting them into our overall plan. We came up with some new ideas, but suddenly we would need a lot more datas and mainly a lot of time to make them real, but we believe, that in the future we will be able to create those homes and make a better life for our users and for the environment as well.
Acknowledgements:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JgDnNndqep7Np_DybhP_I__8nOvCdHXy/view - inspired by this one
http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm
http://www.estudiokoi.com/works/emeter/index.html
https://meetingoftheminds.org/three-principles-sustainable-business-17739
https://www.nosleeplessnights.com/fitbit-new-sleep-tracking/
Piktochart - where all the infographics were made
We would like to thank the the NYAS JA and our mentor Kaari Casey for this opportunity!