Inside Out Bot

While thinking of building devices to help express emotions, we thought that such device would be of most benefit to people on the autism spectrum, who have more difficulty with recognising and expressing their own internal emotions.

Therefore we came out with some sketches of some ideas we thought could work for such a device. This was the generic direction we went with:

“Those with autism spectrum disorder face trouble in social situations as they have more difficulty understanding others’ verbal or non-verabl feelings. They may also face social anxiety due to that. We want to try to create a device that would help them either understand themselves/others better.”

Amanda’s Sketch:

Daryl’s Sketch:

Sylvia’s Sketch:

Final Idea:

We decided to go with the execution of Amanda’s idea on the Telegram Bot API while incorporating Daryl’s idea of using straightforward questions to allow the user to figure out their own emotion.

Reference Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IC-Z78aTOs

We first tried to create our own Telegram Bot (@insideout_bot) with the BotFather and used its unique API to integrate it into our Arduino code. We then created a simple 3 question quiz that would calculate the answers to formulate what emotion the person was likely feeling.

We focused on the main 5 emotions that were also in the Disney movie, Inside Out.

Original Quiz Breakdown

We first tried the method of assigning the answer of each question a value and coding it so that the sum of certain values will trigger a color to represent the emotion. But we realised the values/answers received from the Telegram bot could not be ‘stored’ long enough for its values to be stacked up.

FINAL Quiz Breakdown

So we went with the method of assigning a different output type to each question. These are the final emotions we worked with:

EMOTION – COLOR
HAPPY – YELLOW (playing)
SAD – BLUE (sleeping)
ANGRY – RED (screaming)
FEAR – PURPLE (hiding)

INTENSITY OF EMOTION – BRIGHTNESS OF COLOR
A little only > To Ceiling > To Sky > To Moon
(Dimmer > Dim > Bright > Brighter)

FINAL CODE

https://textuploader.com/1pcay

https://youtu.be/V3-b_5fDAm0

Bot Screenshots

 

 

Clicking any option but ‘YES’ after ‘Is this how you feel right now?” will trigger the same questions to be asked again