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dont-touch-men v3 (readme update)

Alert people before they are touching MEN (Mouth Eyes Nose).

ITERATION 3 / WORK IN PROGRESS

Demo: https://i3games.github.io/dont-touch-men/

2021 update. From what is currently known, Covid 19 is transmitted via aerosols, see e.g.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

Therefore previous public advice regarding infection prevention may be inaccurate.

There may be useful applications to monitor / prevent involuntary self-face touching. This project does NOT constitute medical advice. It is intended as a showcase for machine learning on mobile devices / in the browser.

During the first weeks of the panemic, during videoconferences and on social media I noticed people constantly touching their faces. It seems to happen subconsciously. Even if you tell people not to do it they will have their hand in their face a minute later. Science has numbers: "On average, each of the 26 observed students touched their face 23 times per hour. Of all face touches, 44% (1,024/2,346) involved contact with a mucous membrane."

Kwok, Yen Lee Angela, Jan Gralton, and Mary-Louise McLaws. 2015. ‘Face Touching: A Frequent Habit That Has Implications for Hand Hygiene’. American Journal of Infection Control 43 (2): 112–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2014.10.015.

I assume that this app could help to nudge people by warning them when their hands comes close to their faces.

How to use

Do not touch your face in order to test this app.

Don’t touch MEN runs in modern web browsers (Firefox and Chrome). Based on my testing I recommend Chrome.

  1. You need a webcam showing your head and shoulders
  2. Download / clone this repo
  3. Run index.html through a webserver, e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Common_questions/set_up_a_local_testing_server
  4. To work with mobile devices at all, it must be served over an https connection.

How it works: Don’t touch MEN uses the Tensorflow bodypix model version 2. This is a trained machine learning model that takes an image, detects different body parts such as head and hands and returns an array with different values for each part. I take a sample around hand values and check if it is a head value. If so, the alarm is triggered.

ITERATION 2 / WORK IN PROGRESS

With the first prototype I saw a number of problems:

  • False Positives especially when turning my face.
  • False Negatives especially briefly after an alarm.
  • Delays through poor performance.
  • Does not work on iPad/Safari

I rewrote the app with TensorFlow.js using BodyPix version 2 and Tone.js.

This has improved the reliability and performance significantly. I am still experimenting with various parameters. The app needs testing on different devices, in different conditions, with different people.

Iteration 2 uses the following libraries / frameworks / tools

Iteration 1 was built with the following libraries / frameworks / tools

Similar tools

Some people have built or are building similiar tools. Here are the ones I am aware of.