1. Data analysis

Currently, anxiety is becoming a hot topic of concern. An online survey involving tens of thousands of people across China shows that the public's mental and psychological problems were highlighted during the Newcastle pneumonia epidemic, with about 30% of the people surveyed experiencing sub-health conditions such as depression, anxiety and insomnia.

Our analysis of World Health Organization data shows that only 5% of the world's population is completely healthy, 20% of the population has been diagnosed with a disease by a doctor, and 75% of the population is in a sub-healthy state.

"The prevalence of serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia has not changed much in the last 20 years. However, the presence of anxiety and depressive states is increasing in the sub-population"

—— Lin Lu, Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences, President of Peking University Sixth Hospital

All the above situations show that people have physical and mental stress that needs to be relieved. So, what can we do to solve this problem? We hope that by producing different scents, we can help people associate with good memories and thus relieve emotional stress.

At the same time, we identified our first potential clients - students or workers with physical and mental stress.

2. Market Research

As people are affected by bad emotions, it is difficult to do self-exclusion, giving rise to a lot of cold and warm ambient light, aromatherapy, essential oils and other products.

But these products mainly have the following three problems.

1. The current market of aromatherapy products can not be released according to people's emotions corresponding to the smell, can not play the function of accurate regulation of emotions.
2. Most of the fragrances in the current market are chemical synthetic fragrances, Chemical methods are less economical than biological methods for the production of high-value raw materials.
3. The current market exists in ambient light, aroma, essential oils and other products to achieve a single function, can not complete the automatic identification and light, music, smell a combination of diversified regulation.

Therefore, we have set the following business objectives.

3. Business objectives

Make a box where AI recognizes emotions and releases fragrances

Nowadays, many music apps can use AI to customize people's playlist for a period of time based on their preferences and the type of songs they often listen to, to help people find the music space in their lives and relax their emotions. Since music can be privately customized and regulate emotions from an auditory perspective, why not scent from an olfactory perspective?

We are going to develop a scent box with automatic scent release placed on the desktop. It will analyze your current mood according to your expression and heart rate, and release the corresponding scent to help you relieve stress. After research, we initially identified the lily of the valley and rose fragrance. When you are depressed, we hope that the lily of the valley fragrance can be released to help you feel happy; when you are anxious, we hope that the rose fragrance can help you feel tranquil.

In the future, we will look for more scents to help you privately customize your favorite gas world.

4. Product description

Detailed process of product work：

1. recognition process the device first facial recognition and bracelet monitoring system to determine the user's emotional changes at this time. Among them, facial recognition using camera capture and convolutional neural network calculation judgment, heart rate detection using the user wears a bracelet detector as the basis.

In the recognition process, we also strictly comply with the data protection regulations and user authorization regulations, and provide excellent protection of the user's privacy.

Because our products require facial information to identify emotions, users may be concerned about the leakage of personal information, so this information is handled with the highest security. The user is prompted for camera permissions before the program runs, and the user's personal information is only saved locally and deleted after the program runs.

2. Judgment process: We use the heart rate read by the bracelet as an emotion judgment threshold, combined with the results of emotional facial recognition for multimode calculation. The obtained data is processed and analyzed, and subsequently the emotions such as sadness are output as various combinations, like blue light signals.

3. Adjustment process: The adjustment is the blue light system. When the user's sadness is recognized, the blue light system will be activated, prompting the bacteria in the device to synthesize 2-PE, releasing the sweet rose fragrance to help people feel happy.

In the odor release section, we use fans to accelerate palatalization. In the form of bladeless fans, the wind is gentle and the air supply area is small, and volatile substances are more conducive to blowing to the user. The wind blown out of bladeless fan passes through the internal air duct, there will be no violent wind impact, it is more gentle and stable。The physical picture is shown below:

Considering that the release of chemicals may be suspected of misuse of chemicals, or there are some indirect effects on the human body, the molecules we choose are essentially some aromatic compounds or mixtures extracted from the plant itself, which will reduce this effect to some extent. We reviewed the thresholds for selecting odor molecules and ensured that the amount of odor molecules released did not exceed this threshold.

The overall process is shown below, where the image of the demonstration is the mascot we designed . It is divided into angry red to carry out emotional identification, calm green for observation software calculations, and then sad blue experiments in emotional regulation change to happy yellow。

In the future, we will also add music and lighting parts to the product. Music can trigger and affect people's emotions. Lighting often appears together as the visual language of music, which has a more multidimensional impact on people. The combination of light and music is emotionally powerful and can have a diverse impact on people. So we plan to add Audible and visual function to the hardware system to help regulate users' emotions.The following picture is our design of sound and light PCB board, with sound signal output port and light control signal output port.

In the future, we can also add a red light system based on blue light to induce bacteria to secrete different odors through different light

Product Label:

We designed the cartoon image of our project, and in terms of commercialization, we want it to be our ambassador and help us to promote it.

The design inspiration for this image is as follows:

At the beginning, when setting the mascot, the team members expressed their own opinions. The first idea was a cute pet as the tone, which set the general tone of this mascot as cute. Considering that our project itself is related to emotion regulation, and in the traditional Chinese mythological story 《The Mountainsea》, there exists a magical animal called Bai Ze, which can understand human nature and recognize emotions. So we used some of the cultural features of Bai Ze such as two goat horns, four ears, cute bean eyes, and a cute mouth like a cat's.

——Peiqi Zhou

On the specific details of the design.

I was mainly responsible for adding some small details. I first collected many different accessories and went to match them one by one according to their image. For example, the green one added a small collar flower, the red one added two clusters of flames on the side, the yellow one added a garland on the corner, and the blue one wore black round-framed glasses, which would make it look more melancholy.

——Fanrui Guo

5. SWOT Analysis

1. Strengths

AI emotion recognition intelligent novelty

More variety of scents can be added

Price advantage in the production of some scarce raw materials

2. Weakness

High production cost in the short term

Low product awareness

3. Opportunity

Young people today are stressed and have a lot of negative emotions

More and more people pay attention to emotional changes

Advances in facial recognition technology, machine learning

The development of Internet and cloud computing

4.Threats

Personal biological information leakage

Biological leak

6. Market demand

In order to realize our products, we conducted a series of market research to demonstrate the feasibility of the products.

For our target users, we distributed questionnaires to friends around us and online, recovered nearly 2,000 copies, and analyzed the survey data and found that about 90% of people have different degrees of pressure on going to school, work, family and other aspects, and more than 60% of people have two or more pressures; In addition, more than 50% of people said they were interested in and willing to pay for products that regulate their emotions by releasing odors, which undoubtedly shows that our projects are the trend of the times.

When we surveyed people about the smells that would make people feel happy, many people chose the smell they liked as a child, and some people were obsessed with the smell they smelled in some happy moments, which also provided ideas for the subsequent development of our products.

7. Product Sales Plan and Business outlook

For the product characteristics, our product is mainly for the twenty to thirty years old pressure of the office workers, students group.

For the products described in the business objectives above, we treat them as first generation products.

We can use the online publicity + online sales approach. For publicity we can be on Tik tok, Little Red Booklittle, Bilibili, Micro-blog and other social platforms where the target group is active . Sales can also be from Tik Tok Shopping, Taobao store, Bilibili peripheral and other online channels.

We believe our project can make a difference to the traditional aromatherapy industry. In the short term, our project could be a new type of intelligent aromatherapy device to help people with emotional regulation. In the long term our project can also be applied in the following scenarios:

1. The VR games

In this regard, we interacted with relevant students from Northeastern University and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.(The picture below was taken at that time.)

After the project introduction and some detailed discussions, we reached a preliminary cooperation intention and will continue to improve our products in the following aspects in the future:

① Reduce the cost of hardware equipment and prolong the use of the product

②Adding a red light system, adding other scents that can be released, and providing custom scents specifically for the game

③ Face recognition and bracelet part if used in horror games for emotion detection, can be used as a device to prevent overreaction and increase the corresponding alarm system.

We believe our production will definitely bring more extreme experience sense to VR games.

2. 4D/5D movie atmosphere rendering

Through the release of the smell in the film projection, it infects the audience's emotions, so that the audience is immersive, to achieve the effect of 4D, 5D film.

We communicated with a Beijing Film Academy student about the role of our project in film.

Above is a screenshot of our chat with a student of Beijing Film Academy

She thinks our product is very creative and can be integrated into the film as an important part of atmosphere rendering. Further follow up could be a personalized scent for the actors to help them better express their emotions.

3. Aromatic therapy

By using different scents and aromas of essential oils to soothe the emotions and thus achieve both mental and physical relaxation and healing.

Our team member, Chanjuan Jin (far right in the picture), talks with a professor at Jilin University who studies medical aspects of the brain. They believe that if our project can produce a corresponding scent, then the specific scent should have an effect on people's emotions.

Scientists are still working tirelessly on how scent and mood interact with each other. Some studies have shown that when the mind is disturbed, the smell of roses can calm the mind; when the mood is low, the smell of fresh apples or reeds can make people feel better; and the smell of lavender can increase a person's trust when interacting with others. Different smells directly affect our emotional perception through the sense of smell, especially if we perceive a certain smell with strong emotions, then the next time we smell that smell, it will trigger a more pronounced emotional response.

In the future, we will explore more deeply the role of scent on emotions.

4. An immersive museum of Flora and fauna

By simulating the smell of natural flora and fauna, visitors can get an immersive experience in the museum.

We spoke to the students about our project. The students suggested that we could recreate more natural scents, or some animal scents, and hold several exhibitions such as scent museums. They believe this kind of exhibition will be very attractive.

5. Travel indoors without leaving your home

Experience a dreamy scent journey by smelling the world at home

In this regard we talked to Manager Lee of O'Laughlin, who is a very experienced practitioner in the fragrance industry. He thinks our product is very innovative in the fragrance industry at the moment and believes it will attract a lot of interest. He suggested that we could customize scents for many themed hotels. Or design the scent of each city to help people experience a world travel without leaving home.

At the same time, we can also consider working with O'Laughlin to help them produce some rare incense raw materials that are currently produced in small quantities by means of synthetic biology.

We call the product the second generation after the improvement as above.

Later we can cooperate with many large companies that are currently doing biological production of incense, aromatherapy companies, beauty salons, game companies, movie theaters through product promotion, iteration, linkage, co-branding and other forms of cooperation. Further expand the visibility, in order to achieve better commercial results.