we are from India and people rarely talk openly about menopause here. My teammate is a medical student and I asked her to find details about what symptoms her mom and her friend's mom faced and what did they do about it. Strangely, most of them did not realize those symptoms. Maybe, they had those symptoms but did not realize that they were having those symptoms. They mostly took short term medications for particular symptom and this is more dangerous.
we discussed many days on the same topic and we were trying to find out what possibilities can be there for a non Invasive tech solution that is affordable.
I watch ted talks frequently and one such video named The hidden brain in your skin is the inspiration behind our project.
Symptoms targeted- Stress
- Night sweats
- Anxiety
- Hot Flushes
- Difficulties Concentration
- Allergies
- Shocks
- Panic disorder
- Mood Swings
- Sleep disorder
All these symptoms that women face have one thing in common. These are neurological symptoms. Our Autonomous nervous system controls all these involuntary responses. Women have a hormone called estrogen which is responsible for everything including the symptoms. Estrogen level decline in women with age. This decline causes many problems in them which is at peak during pre and post menopause.
Bridging Biology and Cyber-physical systemsOur skin has untapped potential. We all may have realized that we feel some tingling sensation in our skin while we are afraid or hairs in the skins standing up in response to cold conditions or shocking news.
There are many such instances that provide evidence that the skin is the bridge between environment and our brain.
The NIOSH states Under dry conditions, the resistance offered by the human body may be as high as 100, 000 ohms. Wet or broken skin may drop the body's resistance to 1, 000 ohms, " adding that "high-voltage electrical energy quickly breaks down human skin, reducing the human body's resistance to 500 ohms.
So, in our project we are monitoring Electrodermal activity and it can be inferred and co-related to helping many symptoms of menopause and similar conditions.
Project DetailsUse cases:
- Monitoring Sleep
The glove can be used in many scenarios. The graph above clearly shows that when I was awake and when I was in deep sleep. The glove can be worn during sleep and if there is any data that is abnormal like the occurrence of hot flushes and night sweats can be detected using triggers in the Adafruit IO dashboard and It could trigger another Internet Of Things(IOT) node to subscribe to the trigger feed hence turning on the Fan.
- Monitoring Meditation
Meditation and relaxation activities are the best things to do to reduce and slow down the decline of Estrogen Hormone. Studies and Research show that meditation is the only thing other than hormone therapy and hormone intake that can reduce hot flushes and such anxiety distresses over time and sometimes completely eliminate it. This idea is inspired from the hypnotherapy activity that is done. This cheap and plug and play glove can be worn during relaxation activity and the values over time will be uploaded in the Internet of Things(IOT) dashboard.
The user can recall her last meditation exercise and will have an insight to how fruitful was the activity. She could try to improve upon her past stats by trying to bring down the peaks.
This activity will boost concentration and reduce the occurrence of many of the symptoms listed above.
Making
- Trial 1: In the beginning I tried to make a wristband and tried to record the data but I was not giving reliable data.Also, the foil was getting torn up. so this method was discarded. The picture below shows the band.
- Trying with Glove
Hardware making steps:
The above figure 3 shows the steps for making the hardware for sending the Electrodermal activity data to the IOT Dashboard.
Dashboard settings steps:
The above carousel shows the steps for making settings in the dashboard for the data chart that is to be monitored.
DEMO VEDIO:
BILL OF MATERIALS
- FOR MONITORING GLOVE
- FOR TRIGGER FAN CONTROL
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