Hapi Alarm

Alarm started ringing, start the challenges
Set the Alarm
Smile :)

Inspiration

We all hate waking up in the morning, so it's no wonder snoozing the alarm happens more often than we'd all like. What's worse is canceling the alarm by mistake then waking up hours later realising you missed some important event because of a badly designed alarm clock application, and your dreadful morning grogginess.

The world deserves an alarm clock application that does what it's supposed to do: wake you up no matter what!

What it does

HapiAlarm puts a twist in how the alarm is dismissed; you have to do it with your face -- and be expressive. The app requires you to do a series of challenges; look into the phone's front camera and show the emotions the alarm clock asks you to -- smile, look surprised, or even show your true morning feelings and make a sad face. Once you've done a number of these, the alarm stops!

How we built it

We created the Android App using Android Studio and the SDK tools to implement the UI and most of the functionality, while for interpreting facial expressions we've sent queries to the Microsoft Cognitive Emotion API.

Challenges we ran into

We haven't had much prior experience with Android Development, so figuring out how to do some things (like opening a camera preview, snapping pictures periodically without storing them) took some effort. Another issue we had was that the camera was returning the images rotated by 90 degrees, and while we knew this we had no idea the Microsoft Congitive API doesn't work on images where the faces are rotated, so it took us some time to figure out why our app wasn't working :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making this app work decently well in under 24 hours!

What we learned

How to work with the Android Development tools.

What's next for Hapi Alarm

Allow the user to set the length and difficulty of the challenges.
Make the ringtone increase in volume as you fail challenges.
Change the alarm ringtone
Make the alarm persistent - no way to stop it unless you succeed in all the challenges
Detect if your eyes are closed (although then you couldn't read the challenge requirements :) )
Detect if your cheating by putting pictures instead of your camera