General updates:
- Worked on and finished the design report (the vast majority of our time this week was spent here).
- Worked with musicians on 10/9 to test out rough camera setup & tension detection algorithm—see Shaye’s status report for more info.
Product solution considerations:
A was written by Jessie, B was written by Danny and C was written by Shaye.
Part A:
We hope our product will allow pianists of all skill levels, from hobbyists and beginner students to professionals, to protect themselves from hand and wrist injuries related to piano playing– all players can benefit from injury prevention. The product’s utility, though intended for students with access to a teacher, could also be applied to those who are self-taught. However, the self-taught student would also have to self-learn how to identify correct positioning in order to properly set the initial calibration. Additionally, our system does not rely on a laptop to host our system, so users with only access to a phone or a tablet can also protect themselves. The system will also have simple and intuitive features, so it does not require the user to be technologically advanced.
Part B:
Our product will hopefully encourage people to either learn or continue playing the piano. Whether you are completely new to the piano or perhaps have been injured in the past, our product will ensure that these players are avoiding positions that can cause injury. We hope that the peace of mind our product will provide will lead to an increase in piano players. If the amount of pianists increases due to our product then we believe that we are contributing to a growing and deeper culture. While we are targeting piano players, we believe that a more musically inclined population is able to both better appreciate the culture we currently have but also make contributions to the culture we all share.
Part C:
We account for environmental factors with our system in two main ways: by using less power-hungry hardware, and by decreasing overall medical interventions for wrist strain injuries. In terms of hardware, our FPGA-based system would use less power than a Jetson/ GPU based system, minimizing power consumption during longer practice sessions. If our proof-of-concept becomes more widely adopted, this difference in power consumption would have a large impact on reducing overall energy waste from our system.
Additionally, by preventing wrist strain injury in pianists, our product will decrease the amount of medical resources spent attending to those injuries, thus reducing the environmental impact of those resources. This includes a variety of healthcare items, ranging from single-use wrist wraps to energy spent on wrist imaging.