Buddy - A personal home office assistance
Buddy collects temperature, humidity, light, human presence data, calculates productivity, helps break sedentary, built on AWS Edukit.
What Problem Are We Talking About ? Corona virus out-break has put our lives upside dow, creating new norms. The most obvious impact of COVID-19 on the labor force is the sharp increase in employees working remotely. Some companies are already planning to shift to flexible workspaces after positive experiences with remote work during the pandemic, a move that will reduce the overall space they need and bring fewer workers into offices each day. A survey of 278 executives by McKinsey in August 2020 found that on average, they planned to reduce office space by 30 percent [source ]
While WFH provided flexibility and cost reduction for companies, there are some serious side effects. Recent studies have indicated, work from home brought serious physical and mental health issues impacting overall productivity of a person and after work life. Most of key factors are
- Improper work schedule, sitting on chair/couch for extensive period of time
- Less physical activity
- Inadequate ambient light which makes person less energetic after work
- Improper working temperature and humidity
- Improper indoor air quality
Based on statistics 1/3 of the population working remotely don't have dedicated or proper home office. When we are in office, most of the environmental measurements are monitored/controlled by office infrastructure.
Introducing Buddy
Buddy is a smart device built on AWS Edukit ( M5Stack Core 2 ), connecting a set of sensors
- BME680 - To capture room temperature, humidity and indoor air quality
- AK9753 - To capture human movement, it can precisely capture left-right, up-down movement
- Light Sensor - To capture room ambient light
Buddy is accompanying by a mobile app which connects to the device over bluetooth. Device runs an algorithm to calculate productivity considering temperature, humidity, light and IAQ. The productivity percentage is simply a number to indicate productivity. This number can be used to make necessary adjustment to your environment.
App also sends you reminder to take a break from work and walk to break sedentary.
Checkout the full project code and instruction on Hackster.io