This week we did Ethics discussion about our project. While discussing about how technology projects have ethical side effects, we got to think about how our project can impact the way we expect to be, and the way we don’t expect to be. Ideally we want Myorun to be used by enthusiasts who would like to try out a fun game without touching controllers, or perhaps people who need to use arm muscles for rehabilitative purposes. But we also got to realize that the design of our solution could cause an unexpected negative outcome. One such example is putting on the electrode pads in a wrong place or having external substances (sweat, lotion, etc.) on arms that could impact the signals in arms. This could decrease EMG classification accuracy and affect playability of the games. These could be addressed by constructing a fixed wearable electrode sleeve, but we have determined that due to time constraints it is beyond our scope of the project. 

On team’s status, we are slightly behind track in the Gantt chart. This is partly because of the change in our plan immediately after our design review that we should be collecting data from more people. Originally we had intended to train on one person to get the best performance. Because of COVID conditions, finding enough sample would be very difficult, and could get us very low accuracy results. So we had decided previously to have a highly accurate and performant result by training on single person. However, the consensus was that the argument would be much more compelling if we train on more people. So we are collecting more data this week from other people.

As a contingency plan, Kayla is continuing to work on ML algorithms with existing recorded data. In case that collecting data on multiple people takes longer than expected we still have data set to run and train SVM to classify and bring results. This is a good back up plan for the upcoming demo and moving forward. And with more data from people this coming week, Kayla will be able to get those data as well and train. The software side is also experiencing slight delay because more thorough planning and restructuring needed to be done to make upcoming features easier to develop. At this point, game is pretty much playable and is a working product, but more features like diverse obstacles and coins, animations need to be implemented to make the game more fun. Despite the slight changes in plan, everyone is working in parallel to maximize productivity and get back in track.