Overview

The Tree Hugger is an innovative IoT solution to nurture empathy for nature in children. By forming an emotional connection with trees in the early stages of human lives, we hope to address the fragility and risk of our natural environment.

Featuring technical implementation, this project also demonstrates a user-centered process where design adds huge value to our product.

Keywords

Internet of Things, Physical Computing, Arduino Adafruit, MQTT Platform, Python, Google Natural Language API, Rhino, 3D Printing, User-centered Design

Problem

When many people were little, they had watched disaster talks and news that aimed to raise their awareness of saving our ecosystem. However, those turned out to be not as effective in terms of creating compassion, which, according to research, will directly influence children’s engagement in environmentally-friendly practices (Cheng & Monroe, 2012).

Therefore, our design question is ---

How might we encourage children to form an emotional attachment to nature?

Cheng, J. C.-H., & Monroe, M. C. (2012). Connection to Nature: Children’s Affective Attitude Toward Nature. Environment and Behavior, 44(1), 31–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916510385082

Concept and Research

Starting from our users — children, we envision children to talk to trees through an inviting and child-friendly interface, which reminded us of a toy friend. We believe that only with a thorough understanding of how children want to interact with a toy and a friend can we make the product effective and attractive.

Research goals: finding out —

How do children interact with a toy?
How do children interact with a friend?
What do children want to know from a tree?

We conducted user research with 16 children in total --

4-9

years old

14

surveyed

2

interviewed

Insight and Strategy

After user reserach, we found that --

When sharing secrets, children like to be face-to-face instead of mouth-to-ear
Most of the children want to learn about how the tree is feeling at different points of its life
Children want the output in the form of words and sounds

Therefore, we formulated how the system would flow based on the Arduino components we had and our research findings. We have a sensor device placed on a tree to record humidity and temperature data, which are interpreted into different emotions depending on whether the values are within the tree’s preferred conditions. These emotions are outputted to express the tree’s moods and help establish empathy in children. Additionally, children are also encouraged to talk to and “cheer up” the tree if the tree has a low mood. Once the tree detects a positive input by the child, the tree will change the mood to express happiness for the child. By creating this two-way interaction with feedback from both sides, we are strengthening the relationship between the child and the tree.

The Build

Hardware

Raspberry Pi 3 B+

ESP8266 x 2

Speaker

Microphone

LED strip (30 Neopixels)

Servo x 2

Button

Software

Python

Arduino Adafruit

Google Cloud Platform

MQTT Communication

Technical Details

Diagram

This technical diagram shows the mechanics of the whole system in detail. MQTT was used for all remote data exchange and Raspberry Pi for connecting Python and Arduino.

Github Repositories: https://github.com/willayang21/willa_yang_440final