Information Technology Assistant
Overview
For this project, I was responsible for gathering participants, programming, and creating the concept fot the prototype video. The objective was to create some sort of device that would assist IT workers and evaluate how it would perform in a real world scenario.
Project Statement
IT workers can have an overwhelming amount of work to accomplish, with a myriad of problems faced on a daily basis, especially problems such as power surges, data corruption, and other various networking issues.
Methods
I first tried gathering participants via Reddit, specifically via r/InformationTechnology, which was not successful. I then tried finding our particpants via various IT-centric Discord servers, from which I did find my participants. From there, participants were invited to a Zoom meeting, which was recorded. From there, my partner took additional notes.
During each interview, we asked the participant several questions about their opinion on robots and virtual assistants. We also asked each participant to draw their ideal device, and after the first participant, showed them our other participants’ ideas, and asked for their opinions on them.
Findings
In short, our participants all agreed that a humanoid or other type of social robot would not be beneficial. Rather, they chose more of a “smart” tool that can be programmed to the user’s satisfaction.
Prototype
Click here for a skit showing off the possibilities of our device.
Code for the prototype can be found here.
Evaluation
Due to CoVID-19, we were unable to test our project in a real-world environment. Beyond that, due to the limitations of the Arduino hardware, we were not able to implement checking for electrical failures or packet loss in any capacity. We were able to fully implement temperature and humidity detection, thanks to the device that was included with our Arduino kit.