Galaga Prototype - Maker Therapy Mood Badge

Making some progress on my device. The "Mood Badge" is an idea that I had a while ago to help patients involved with Maker Therapy. Maker Therapy (http://www.makertherapy.com/) is an initiative to bring "maker" education to kids in extended hospital stay. Unfortunately, while these kids are in the hospital, nurses and other hospital staff tend to come into and out of their rooms a lot. You can imagine that this gets quite annoying pretty quickly. Also, if you consider the fact that these kids are sick, they get especially annoyed because now they feel like they can't be by themselves and rest. The idea of the Mood Badge is that kids can display their mood on the 8x8 LED matrix with an emoji. They can wear the device around their neck, hang it outside their door, etc. This way, nurses and other hospital staff can be aware of how the patient is currently feeling and can adjust how often they enter the patient's room.

So it's pretty fun to build and I hope the patients really like it. I'm also adding games, as this demo shows, because who doesn't like games. I will also add an accelerometer and heart rate monitor in the future. Another issue with kids in extended hospital stay, is they tend to become sedentary. You can imagine that being sick sucks. So, oftentimes the patients tend to sulk a lot. One of the principles behind the makerspace is that the patients will become more active by interacting with all the items devices in the makerspace. With an accelerometer, we can track how much the patients are moving and see how active they are with and without the makerspace.

This has been a pretty fun project overall. I look forward to developing it further. Follow along!

https://github.com/CalvEngIO/Maker-Therapy-Mood-Badge

Видео Galaga Prototype - Maker Therapy Mood Badge канала shoilett1