Initial Phase

Written Ideas/sketches/drawings/images with descriptions.

Use plants to cope with stress

We started our project since we notice that recently students are feeling a lot of stress from school, family and friends. We notice that because of the stress, some of the students are shy to talk, and their grades are not good as well.

We then went on to study more on the topic of how to cope with stress for young people. Based on our research, it showed that:

• 85% of a person’s daily life is spent indoors.
• Young adults spent on average 8.8 hours or 37% of their day on screen (2021, Channel News Asia)
• Stress induced by the use of technological products and reduced social interactions

Different from other traditional methods like going to therapy, we also noticed that spending time around plants increases memory retention by 20%, which can help young students reduce their stress and have a happier life.

Starting from that point, we decided to do more research on how to use plants as a method to cope with stress for young people.

 

Focus more on young kids

Carmen interview pictures

One day, while one of our teammates was reading the newspaper, an interesting news title popped into his mind. It mentioned that MOE is doing a project to spread out seeds to all the grade 3 students in primary school to encourage them to learn growing plants. This news led us to focus more on the primary school students as our main user persona.

Once while we were in the library, we had a chat with secondary school students. There were many interesting findings from the interview.

Elsa is a grade 6 student. She was so into growing plants, however, she knew less about how to grow plants, and the only way for her to learn is to read the instruction on the plant cover. Once she made her plant die, she decided never to grow plants again. She also mentioned that it was true growing plants is so peaceful and can reduce her bad feelings of the day.

Another grade 4 student Tommy loved to grow plants together with their family. We interviewed both Tommy and his grandmother. His grandmother told us that because of growing plants, their family can have more close contact and conversation topics. ‘Growing plants have lots of fun, growing them is like talking to them!’, Tommy seemed to be very excited while he was sharing his proud history of growing plants.

However, some students seemed to be not interested in growing plants at all. Anya, a grade 3 student mentioned that growing plants is so boring, that she preferred to adopt a cat much more than growing plants.

With the help of young kids and their families, we realized that although use plants as a method to cope with stress, there are still some problems we need to solve along the way.

• How to make the process easier for users to grow plants.
• How to create a journey of growing plants with lots of fun.
• How to better connect the goal of reducing stress with growing plants.

 

Detect data to help users grow plants

We want to start the building of hardware while doing more research on understanding our users. The first step for us to do is to understand how users grow plants every day, and what things we can do.

It seemed that users need to water plants, and they also need to provide enough sunshine to the plant, meanwhile, users also need to learn how to control a good temperature and humidity for plants. If users know how to fertilise plants and loose soil, it will be even great.

We need to understand how we can detect whether plants are in bad condition and whether users water the plants. To do so, we planned to use Arduino to help us do the data detection. By comparing with the standard data, we can define whether the plant is in good condition. By comparing the data changes, we can define whether users did any interaction with the plants.

 

How we pick the suitable Arduino

There are so many Arduino boards and it is not easy to choose the most suitable one for our case. We first planned to use Arduino Mega 2560 as the motherboard, however, after doing more research and proposing our plan to Mr Tony, we realized that the power of Arduino Mega 2560 is not strong enough for us to use. We then thought of using Arduino MKR 1100 wifi board as in we also planned to connect our device with the IoT cloud. With the help of Mr Tony, he introduced the Arduino OPLA IOT kit to us. It is an IoT kit designed based on MKR 1100 Wifi board, which is very helpful in our case. Meanwhile, there are many embedded sensors inside, and we only need to purchase a few extra sensors to do customization. It means that we can focus more on how to design the whole user journey while the user is using this product, instead of focusing on how to build up the hardware, which reduced about 20% of the work.

Prototype

Prototype images/videos with descriptions.

Develop hardware version 1(June 1st to June 23rd )

When we received our Arduino kits, we planned to start completing these few goals:

– Focus on data detection & connect to the IoT cloud.

– Able to detect data for humidity, temperature, and moisture.

Since we already have all the sensors, and motherboard we need, we have already learnt a lot of tutorials on setting up devices and programming. However, the journey is still not easy. 

All the other features work properly, however, the screen on the IoT kit which is used to display cannot show anything at all. We were not sure whether it is the programming issue, IOT kit issue or MRK1100 issue, as it is a brand new hardware device. After testing it out by myself for a few days and still could not figure it out, I attempted to approach Mr Tony for advice. 

After 3 days of staying in the MnT lab, we started by learning the basic library of the display screen and tried to work on the example codes provided by the library. Then we tried to test out with another IoT kit and MKR 1100. After many rounds of testing, we realized that the issue was coming from the display screen on the IoT kit, the wire is disconnected. It also meant that we need to buy another new IoT kit.

After a few weeks of delivery, with the new IoT kit, we finally achieved our goal for Version 1!

 

Develop hardware version 2 (June 24th to July 6th)

With our first version of the product, we decided to move to version 2. And we planned to complete these features.

– Focus on data detection & visualization.

– Able to connect data for light, and touch buttons.

– Translate data into a more visualized presentation to perform the emotion of the plants.

We understood that since our target audience is all kids, it is not enough to just show the diagram of how the status of a plant. Providing more visualised diagrams will help kids to easily understand what is going on with the plants. 

However, it is not easy to draw any diagrams on such a small screen(2.4cm*2.4cm). It only allows users to draw basic shapes and text.

To have complex drawings. I started by combining simple shapes to build up a more complex shape. For example, the symbol of temperature is a thermometer. To draw it, I need to draw a rectangle at the top, followed by a circle at the bottom, then in the middle, I need to draw a few small rectangles with the background colour, so that it can cover some parts of the big rectangle.

It needed many times of attempts, as we need to make sure our drawings are perfect in pixels.

 

Develop hardware version 3 (July 7th to July 28th)

Based on version 2, we decided to move to version 3. And we planned to complete these features.

– Focus on data visualization & gamification.

– Connect growing plants with stress management.

– Able to detect timing data.

– Users can communicate with plants.

For this version, we planned to focus on how to let kids interact with plants, it is what we call gamify the journey to create a ‘’user-plant interaction’’.

Take our Communication feature as an example. If this feature is triggered, plants will greet the user, and share its feeling of the day, then ask users to input their happiness level of the day or their feelings of the day. Once plants receive users’ input, they will then deliver different suggestions on how to feel better based on the user’s input.

Designing user-plant interaction is a very challenging task. To do so, we read a lot of essays and had a call with Dr Bernaldo from Spain. However, there is not enough research on this topic, so we have to start from the beginning. We did some extra interviews with our target audience and tried to understand what are the features they want to own the device. After many tests, we then come out with our final product.

 

Develop hardware version 4 (July 28th to Present)

Based on the feedback from users, professors and internal evaluation. We did some changes based on Version 3 of the product.

– Add a watering system to the plant, so that users can easily water the plant, and the moisture detection is more accurate.

– Define the guideline for Screen & buttons, to make the product consistent to use in all scenarios.

– Use a gesture sensor to detect some of the gestures from users, to make the product more interactive.

– Design a demo mode to make it more user-friendly to run user testing.

– Solve some internal bugs.

After building all of these, we are finally able to test our final product.

Final Product

 

Target user: Kids from 7 to 12 years old.

The objective of this product: Help kids solve stress issues by bringing nature closer to them with advanced technology.

Features of this product:

Before activation:

1. Select plant: The user can select a specific type of plant. Based on user selection, the analysis may perform differently.
2. Give the plant a name: The user can select a name for the plant, it can make the relationship between the user and plant closer.

After activation:

1. The plant will alert users with disappointing sound, text and gifs if the moisture, temperature, or humidity is not good for the plant to grow. It will also alert users when the light is not good for users to read & study.
2. Once the user did some changes to make the environment of the plant become better, it will thank the users who did the changes. And it will count as 1 interaction of the day.
3. If the moisture is low for the plant, the user can easily water the plant by following the instructions shown on the screen.
4. The plant will ask users for the happiness level of the day, and it can be able to compare the happiness level of the day with the happiness level of yesterday.
5. The plant will ask users to input an emotional word to summarize the day, and it can be able to compare the emotions of the users on different days.
6. Users are able to check the story between the user and the plant, which means the user can understand how long he stays with the plant every day, and how many interactions happened during the day.
7. If the user is not around the plant, the plant will go to sleeping mode.