Brainstorm:
1. Parking sensors/alerts: let you know when lot is full and when parking time is up and ask if you would like to pay for more parking time
2. Gym sensors: let you know when machines are free, big screen at front of gym to show this, app to notify you when something on your waiting list opens up
3. Restaurant wait times: enter party size and phone number, sends you a text when a table is open
4. Task list through email: This allows you to add a task to your task list while you read an email. You read an email and need to add some information from it into a task list, so you select text and say “add task” and then you can add notes etc.
5. Picture translator: App to take pictures of text and translate it into language of your choice
6. Meeting Planner: everyone enters preferred locations and timings and it calculates a central location and time, sending all participants a schedule and map
7. Food expiration: You enter your list of groceries when you buy them, and it sends you a warning of when your food might start to spoil
8. Seat Locator: Keeps track of open seats in the library and what preferences they are associated with, allows person to choose preferences and shows the person available options
9. Sleep Cycle Alarm: This would go along with a wristband that monitors heart rate and such data. You enter around what time you would like to wake up and it will wake you up around that time based on your sleep cycle so that you wake up refreshed.
10. Grocery List: You enter items that you would like to buy and the stores that you are willing to go to and it outputs the prices for the items and a list of products for each store you want to go to
11. Nutrition Helper: You input the things you’ve eaten and it will calculate how much of the daily values of each nutrient you have eaten and how much more you need. It will also output suggestions of items that will give you the nutrients that you haven’t eaten
12. Blind/Curtain Control: This app will work with the blinds in your house to keep your house at a certain set temperature during the day while accounting for the outside temperature, amount of sunlight, and privacy settings
Chosen Idea: Sleep Cycle Alarm
I chose this idea because many people wake up feeling unrested even though they have gotten their recommended seven or eight hours of sleep. This is because they wake up in the middle of one of their sleep cycles. The design of this application is to pair with some pulse monitoring device and to wake the user up by the time they would like. However they application wakes the user up at the end of a sleep cycle so the user wakes up feeling rested.
I tested my prototype on a young male in his twenties who is an officer in the US Army. I was asked a lot of questions about how the application would work accurately. How would the app know when he actually falls asleep? What would happen if he woke up in the middle of the night? How would this work for many people when everyone's sleep cycles are different? If he is only getting a few hours of sleep, what happens when he gets woken up an hour before he would like to wake up?
With these questions, I could introduce a testing option, where the user tries out the app for a few days and if he wakes up rested, he indicates that on the app, if not he says that as well. Then the app could adjust its calculations to guess the sleep cycle more accurately.
In addition, if the sleep cycle happens to end only a few minutes after the time the user would like to wake up, the alarm would wake him up at the end of the previous sleep cycle (thereby an hour or so earlier). I could include an option that allows users to choose how many more minutes they would be willing to sleep after the desired time so that they could wake up at the end of a cycle but not woken up too ea
I had included a "snooze" button in my alarm application. But the user asked how that would affect the sleep cycle calculations. Would he still wake up feeling rested? Or would the snooze button make him feel tired when he wakes up?
For this I could include a few more options, like a small signal is sent to the body when the snooze button is pressed so that the user continues to sleep lightly, thus when the snooze alarm goes off, they would still wake up rested.
With the design of the application itself, he asked why I had a "Going to Bed" button and a "Set Up Alarm" button. What happens when those buttons are pressed is not intuitive and clear. I would change my design to make the functions of the buttons more obvious with different names.
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