ScrollGuard

The Project

This project is an anti-doomscrolling wearable designed to help people become more aware of how often they fall into endless scrolling on apps like TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms. It was inspired by my own experience with scrolling addiction, and by the fact that all of my peers (friends & family) struggle with the same habit. Doomscrolling has become such a normal part of daily life for teens and adults that it often goes unnoticed, even though it wastes time without people realizing it, reduces focus, contributes to memory loss, and affects mental health negatively. I wanted to build something that feels practical and relevant to real life rather than just talking about the problem. The idea behind the project is to detect the physical motion patterns associated with scrolling by wearing a convenient glove and use that data to identify when someone may be stuck in a scrolling loop. By combining hardware, Bluetooth communication, and motion logging, the project creates a system that captures and analyzes real-world scrolling behavior. The glove hardware integrates embedded motion sensors, specifically an accelerometer, to capture fine-grained hand and finger movements associated with scrolling gestures. This allows the system to collect real-time motion data and identify repetitive interaction patterns with a high degree of precision. What made this project challenging was getting the hardware and software to communicate reliably, especially over Bluetooth, while also making sure the motion data was accurate enough to be useful. Moreover, building a project around a behavior that is so common and automatic in people's everyday lives meant thinking carefully about how to make the solution effective without being annoying or intrusive.

View this project on YouTube