MHCI Students Top HackNC
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One MHCI team won first place and another received an award at HackNC2014, a software and hardware hackathon at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that challenged participants to create big things in a small amount of time.
The winning team of MHCI students — Elizabeth Wagstaff, Juan Corzo, Prasannavenkatesh Chandrasekar and Rosina Rodriguez — created Guardian, a mobile app targeted to extreme sports enthusiasts that monitors their activity and sends an alert to an emergency contact if it detects a possible accident. The app also offers specific instructions for certain emergencies, including how to perform CPR and treat shock; what to include in a first aid kit; how to treat a laceration or broken bone; and what to do in case of hypothermia, frostbite, altitude illness and snow blindness. In addition to the app, the students created a companion website that allows the user’s selected emergency contacts to log in and view the user’s location on a map to help determine if they’ve been in an accident. The app will also call 911 if a user doesn’t respond to alerts for a certain amount of time.
A second MHCI team won the Best Myo award for Airchestrate — a web app that uses the Myo gesture control armband to coach both novice and professional conductors on how to effectively lead a group of musicians. Using the accelerometer in the Myo, the application tracks the intensity of the user's conducting patterns, translating the amplitude of arm movements into louder or softer outputs of music. For experienced conductors, Airchestrate also displays visual representations of the music that they're actively manipulating with their hands. Color gradients in the background actively transform to represent the complex interactions between conductor and music, allowing users to craft vivid stories for audiences through both auditory and visual means. Team members included Michael Richardson, Landon Paik, Eric Yi and Jimin Zheng.
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