Let’s face it — people are gonna touch their faces. Sometimes faces itch, especially during allergy season. But the first step toward quitting something like that is to become cognizant of just how often you do it.
With a bracelet like this one from [Mauricio Martins], your face-touching frequency will quickly become apparent. Strap it to your favorite face-scratching arm and go about your day. The code constantly polls the accelerometer to see if your hand is in the vicinity of your visage. If so, red lights circle around and an emergency vehicle-type siren goes off to let everyone around you know you’ve sinned.
This no-touch-face bracelet is awesome because it’s simple and it works. It uses a Circuit Playground Express programmed in Make code, but it would be easy to port it to Arduino or CircuitPython. If you want to make something more elegant, we’re all for it, but you could be using this in the meantime to help condition yourself away from the habit. Check out the demo after the break.
Sometimes you gotta take a step back and make something that just works without getting all fancy. Did you hear the one about the astrophysicist who got magnets stuck up his nose trying to solve this very problem?
Similar approach for $10:
https://mitmedialab.github.io/SmartBand/
Ah nice. I had been thinking last week the cheap fatness trackers had all the HW to do this, but thought they were hard to repurpose. (Mostly due to datasheets for anything in them being in some variant of Chinese only, if you could find them.)
Well, this $10 approach is Arduino compatible, and you don’t even need cables to program it ;)
Great job by Sandeep Mistry, Fanoush and ATC1441 (without forgetting the contributors).
I can see the popcorn fans refusing to use this tech. :-)