Week 6 Progress Update

정원 배
Jun 6
2 min read

Unified & Accessible: Our Smart Daily Assistant Comes Together

This week marked a major turning point — we now have a fully functional, touchscreen-ready AI assistant tailored for daily use, with a clean interface, smart responses, and a focus on simplicity for elderly users.

Full UI Integration on Raspberry Pi

We finalized the design and deployment of our interactive UI using Python + Kivy, running smoothly on the Raspberry Pi 4 with a 7" LCD touchscreen. The interface is now:

White-themed for better readability
Optimized to fit the 800×480 resolution
Divided into four intuitive sections: Weather, News, Music, and Reminders

We also enhanced button clarity and added emoji icons to improve accessibility.

Music, News, and Weather – All on Demand

The core functionality is now fully responsive to typed commands through the "Request" button. Our assistant can:

🎵 Play music from YouTube by searching:“play a song by Taylor Swift” → 5 clickable suggestions appear!
☁️ Fetch real-time weather for any city:“weather in Berlin” → Instantly updates the weather row.
📰 Deliver topic-specific news from The Guardian:“news about rugby” → Headlines show up instantly, with continuous updates via “Refresh News”.

All powered by smart intent recognition and natural language parsing.

Built-in Weekly Reminder Manager

We now support reminders with time and category:

Users can view and add daily reminders through simple popup interfaces.
Today’s schedule shows directly on the screen:
- Morning: Take Pills
- Afternoon: Meet Grandchild
- etc.

This helps users stay on top of their day — with minimal effort.

New Feature: Ask AI (Beta)

We’ve prototyped a simple Q&A chatbot that can answer one-off questions like:

“What is the capital of Sweden?”
“How do I cook rice?”

While not yet fully integrated into our main UI, this feature shows promise for future conversation-based assistance.

Leaflet Ready!

We also completed our WeatherArt leaflet, designed to introduce the project to users and stakeholders. It highlights key features like:

Voice-activated commands
Press-to-talk privacy
Simple interface at a glance
Encouraging healthy habits (e.g., taking medicine, getting sunlight)

Coming Up Next

Integrate the Ask AI feature directly into the main UI
Begin Text-to-Speech (TTS) implementation
Film and publish our next project video update
Final UI polish based on feedback from the leaflet and testing

📚 IBM SkillsBuild + Design Thinking

Week 6 reflects how we’ve continued applying:

IBM’s AI Assistant workflow from SkillsBuild
Design Thinking for elderly users — with focus on minimal interactions, visual simplicity, and clarity

Each button, response, and popup was tested with accessibility and ease of use in mind.