I’m trying to get out of the habit of touching my face and I’m envisioning some sort of wearable that’s triggered by a proximity sensor. I would wear the sensor trigger around my neck and a bracelet/ring on one or both of my wrists/hands then when the object gets within a certain distance of the sensor around my neck it delivers a gentle vibration or electroshock to serve as a reminder for my habit brain to not touch the face.
Things I have access to
Microcontroller programming knowledge (specifically ESP32)
Basic hardware design ability
Basic CAD modeling ability
Ability to make plastic parts either via FDM printing, resin printing, or injection molding
I’m looking for a solution that’s relatively simple to implement (perhaps using some off-the-shelf components), that won’t be glaringly obvious (low size and appearance footprint) and perhaps some guidance on the right technology for this. Maybe NFC? Infrared? Something else? Ideally if it can be done all in software without having to do any hardware tinkering that would be great too but I’m not sure that it’s possible.
edit: I had a coworker who had the Pavlok shock band, so if you want to do this entirely in software, it looks like they’ve opened it up via API. I do not own or have ever used this myself though, so I can’t be of assistance for those details.
DIY electronics is fun but wearables are definitely multidisciplinary (designing for ergonomics and particularly an electroshock device can be intimidating to work on so I sympathize with wanting to avoid this route.
" Ability to make plastic parts either via FDM printing, resin printing, or injection molding"
The Prusa printers in the 3DP space are capable of printing TPU which is a flexible plastic.
Thanks for the replies so far - I had not yet heard of Pavlok. It seems like a really good contender for my use case, and the API looks simple to use. I was considering using an NFC ring as the trigger (https://store.nfcring.com/) and wearing a battery powered ESP32 in an enclosure around my neck with RC522 (ESP32 - RFID/NFC | ESP32 Tutorial) to detect the proximity and send the command to the pavlok to deliver the feedback. It seems like a lot of parts and engineering necessary to achieve what I’m trying to do though. If the Pavlok had NFC it would be easier. It’s also a shame I can’t hack an Oura since I think they have vibration built in. It might be simpler and cheaper to incorporate the haptics into the necklace itself using the breakout that @TravisGood recommended.
The only thing that is confusing me about the Pavlok is the API being HTTP - does that mean it needs to be connected to WiFi for it to work? (EDIT: Looks like it can be controlled over BLE: https://github.com/ztrayl3/PyPav2)