Hi! My name is Zhou Ying from Zhejiang University.
Today, I’d like to introduce you the MossWater
A Living Media Interface for Encouraging Office Workers’ Daily Water Intake
So let me start with a brief introduction.
Water is an essential nutrient for the human body,
regular and sufficient water intake is necessary for people to keep healthy,
but many people tend to forget to drink water when they are busy with work.
Notifications such as alarm clocks, mobile phone vibrations
may cause distractions and interruptions for workers.
Plants are ubiquitous in environments.
Many researchers have tried to create living media interfaces with plants,
By integrating plants, these systems could create
natural and unobtrusive applications.
Besides, humans only have true empathy for living creatures.
When interacting with some systems is beneficial to plants’ health,
empathy can lead people to change their behaviors.
We summarized the benefits of using plants and moss in human-computer interaction.
In addition to the two benefits I just mentioned,
caring for the plant on the desk
has also been proved to improve office workers’ mental health.
In this paper, we chose to use moss in our system.
There are two main reasons.
Firstly, the vitality of the moss is tenacious, it can adapt to different conditions.
Secondly, the dehydration of moss is perceivable as it closes leaves
in a dehydration state and opens again when hydrated.
MossWater is a living media interface using a metaphor
to encourage office workers’ daily water intake.
Dry moss reflects water loss of the human body,
while watering moss is triggered by people’s drinking behaviors.
The system consists of two parts. One is a moss-based display
that waters itself and plays sounds based on the users’ drinking behaviors.
The other is a removable device on the cup
that detects users’ drinking behaviors
and sends the results to the former.
Moss is planted in a 3D-printed pot. Except for the living element,
it consists of an Arduino microcontroller, three different actuators,
a Bluetooth module and a power cell.
The water pump is used to water the moss
and connected with the external water source.
The fan is stuck at the center of the cover. It’s used to air dry the moss
so that the time of moss dehydration can be modified.
The voice module is placed at the bottom of the container
to play a soft water sound as another reminder.
When users use the system, the pot is placed on the user’s desk,
the detection device is tied to the user’s cup.
The time moss is dried is calculated based on
the recommended amount of daily water intake of a sedentary adult,
the average work time
and the assumed amount of user’s water intake at a single time.
Using this system, there are four different states.
When the user drinks water, the water pump will be opened
to water the moss while the fan will be interrupted to avoid splashing
or disturbing the process of moss absorbing water.
As the moss absorbs the water and open leaves,
it turns into a sufficient water state and presents greener.
Then, the moss will be air-dried constantly
with the help of the fan until it turns into dehydration.
At this time the dehydration state is used to remind users to drink water.
However, if the user drinks water within an interval,
the moss will be watered again as a new starting point.
Otherwise, a soft water sound will be played by the voice module
and gradually turned up to a perceivable volume as another reminder.
Based on the observation and the interview responses,
we found that the participants’ reactions to MossWater were positive.
But we also need to further improve our system
to support better performance based on their suggestions.
Thanks very much for your attention.