SnoozeSafe

Inspiration

Drowsy driving is the dangerous combination of driving when sleepy. This usually happens when a driver has not slept enough, but it can also happen because of untreated sleep disorders or shift work. Prescription and over-the-counter medications can also cause drowsiness, and alcohol can interact with sleepiness to increase both impairment and drowsiness.

It is a leading cause for traffic-accidents resulting in property loss, economic damage and deaths across the world. A survey of 19 countries across Europe revealed, that a median of 17% of all drivers have fallen asleep across all the countries that had taken the questionnaire. CDC revealed that 1 in every 25 adult drivers have fallen asleep at the steering wheel at least once in a month.

These starting figures how prevalent drowsy driving is.

An estimated 6,400 people died annually in crashes involving drowsy driving, according to the National Sleep Foundation.

Background

Drowsy driving affects everyone, including adolescents and teens, who are not getting enough sleep (according to the CDC, it is recommended that teens get 8-10 hours of sleep each night). That means interventions focusing on this age group can help reduce drowsy driving. One such intervention is for parents to incorporate discussions and rules on drowsy driving while completing their parent-teen driving agreements.

The prime reasons which lead to Drowsy Driving include:

People who don't get enough sleep.
Commercial drivers operating vehicles such as tractor trailers, tow trucks, and buses (long distance drive).
Drivers with untreated sleep illnesses such as one where breathing stop and begins constantly (sleep apnea).
Drivers who use medicines that make them sleepy.

Learn the warning signs of drowsy driving:

Yawning or blinking frequently.
Trouble remembering the past few miles driven.
Missing your exit.
Drifting from your lane.
Hitting a rumble strip on the side of the road.

Taking into account all the above mentioned sources which show how prevalent drowsy sleeping is and more importantly, how it can occur at the most unforseeable of times.

We would like to present to you:

mainlogo

What it does

SnoozeSafe, is a concatenation of Snooze which literally means to have a short and light sleep, and Safe which means without danger. It is to signify our goal and mission to keep you safe from snoozing off during driving and keeping your attention on the road.

It is a tool that every driver must have in order to prevent the chances of drowsy driving, potential economic damage and possible danger to life. Our app, SnoozeSafe provides features which makes sure that while you are driving, your mind stays on the road and the road alone.

By taking direct camera feed from your device, it monitors your face for signs of drowsiness, until you turn it off.
Once it notices any sign of you sleeping off, it will emit a high pitch alarm until it detect you have woken up.
The app has the capability to detect your heartrate from the camera feed alone to help track of your attention as heartbest can also help detect sleepiness.
Once the sessions ends, it provides you with analytics regarding the session, including the number of times you had snoozed off.
It shows the analysis of the previous sessions in the form of a graph on the home screen.
It also keeps a record of past sessions and analytic summary of those sessions for future need.

As sleeping disorders have a hand in causng drowsy driving, the records can help with tracking and diagonise undiagonised sleeping disorders.

How We Built It

We were heavily inspired by the revised version of Double Diamond design process developed by UK Research Council, which not only includes visual design, but a full-fledged research cycle in which you must discover and define your problem before tackling your solution.

double-diamond-process-first-pdf

Discover: a deep dive into the problem we are trying to solve.
Define: synthesizing the information from the discovery phase into a problem definition.
Develop: think up solutions to the problem.
Deliver: pick the best solution and build that.

We utilized design tools like Figma & Photoshop to prototype our designs and prepared a custom design palette before doing any coding. Through this, we are able to get iterative feedback so that we spend less time re-writing code.

We utilised the following technologies to create and produce the envisioned project: tech stackj

Challenges we ran into

A lot! As I previously mentioned, the whole execution was done from scratch, even the advent of idea in our mind literally came during the opening ceremony from Pratyay. The time factor was a really big factor for us as the three of us are in Germany at the moment. One of us in Frankfurt while the remaining two of us were in Berlin, so co-ordinating with each other became the biggest impeding factor in bringing the idea to fruition. Further than that, few of the technologies wer new to some of us, so learning enough of it to create the solution was a very hard challenge that we were able to overcome during the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of finishing the project on time which seemed like a tough task as we started working on it quite late due to other commitments and were also able to add most of the features that we envisioned for the app during ideation. Moreover, we learned a lot about new web technologies and libraries that we could incorporate into our project to meet our unique needs. And as always, working overnight was pretty fun! :)

A fully working prototype! This has been intense yet insightful journey. We are proud of the final product we designed and engineered within such a short timeframe. This is something we would recommend to our friends and family as we truly believe this is a quality application. The fluidity of the user's experience is something that we take pride in as we strive to return a sense of serenity to the oftentimes stressful and difficult process of studying and learning. This could not have been achieved without harmonizing front-end with back-end components to enhance the learning process.

What we learned

A lot of things, both summed up in technical & non-technical sides. For the technical side, we got to learn so much to give our level best to make the UI/UX look solid which helped us learn more about different design-centric approaches! Not to mention, Stackoverflow was the gem for us while we're troubleshooting some complicated issues late-night. For Non-Technical side, it was an eye-opening experience in the field of time-management and remote work co-ordination.