Don't Touch Ya Face

Cool project, but what got me to comment was the really stellar FAQ on the landing page.

I think it's really hard to strike capture the tone of software in written descriptions of those pieces of software. Coding projects that are programmed in an experimental and light-hearted way can end up being spoken about in somber tones that lose that sense of fun and playfulness.

   - Too many.

This immediately reminded me of the joke about a tourist talking with an old Australian bushman. The original rambles on a bit, but the shorter version is the tourist asks if he knows any bushman remedies for chapped lips.

“What you do, mate,” replies the bushman, “Is lift up your horses tail, and kiss him straight on the bum.”

“And that fixes your chapped lips?!” exclaims the tourist.

“No,” replied the bushman, “But it stops you licking them.”

The URL of the actual app is terrifying. I was certain the site had been hijacked when it redirected to the most suspicious looking URL imaginable at the domain "drv.tw": https://lzdmsmujepoc2xlgp13srg-on.drv.tw/Don%27tTouchYaFace/... (HN shortens this, but I think the real kicker is the '.com.html' at the end)

> I looked up your code because you don't know how to hide it and have made my own cloned app for some reason. Nobody liked you in high school, I'm sorry you had to find out this way.

I really felt this.

We made this a week ago! https://donottouchyourface.com

Being on the spectrum of ADHD, I'm pretty certain that it's going to be absolutely impossible for me to stop touching my and suspect that small nervous habits of this sort just aren't going to be worked out of a significant portion of the population even if I could stop myself somehow.

I'm fortunate I can work remotely. Social distancing is a thousand times easier for me than stopping nervous habits, include touching my face. I suspect such actions are on the interface between conscious control and reflex actions.

I suppose the authorities should still keep telling us to stop doing but I think planners should pretty much assume this is not a barrier that's going to stop the disease.

This is interesting, but I have a serious question to ask;

Does it work on black people's faces? I can have a hand on my face but it would still predict otherwise, it seems like I have to go out of my way to obstruct my face for it to pick it up, and even that with a lot of false negatives.

I have addressed this issue with a simple hardware innovation: the Facespoon.

Find a clean object with a well-defined handle. Use the non-handle end of the object to touch/scratch/adjust/manipulate your face. Clean the object regularly.

Working from home, I've designated a kitchen cooking spoon on my desk for this dedicated task. Plastic appears to better than wood, as it is more-readily cleaned and does not absorb facial oils.

This is awesome. Does anyone have a tutorial they recommend for building something like this (preferably in Python)?

https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com is awesome and it looks super easy to use - but any tutorials if you wanted to learn it the harder way via OpenCV or Darknet?

I found this tutorial from fast.ai but haven't been able to check it out yet: https://course.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=1

With all the talk about not touching your face, I fear that sometimes this is overemphasized for Corona virus. It is a virus with a viral envelope, and viruses with viral envelopes are especially unstable outside of the human body. Keeping your distance to people, not staying long in rooms where droplets may floating in the air carrying virus is just as important if not more.

Also, after washing your hands with soap, viral counts should be so low that there isn't a danger of infecting yourself anymore, so the situation where you sit at your laptop isn't especially dangerous IF YOU WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE USING IT (and possibly wiping the keyboard down with a wrung-out cloth that was soaked in soap water).

I'm pretty sure you just made more people touch their face...

Dr. Michael Osterholm was on Joe Rogan's podcast explaining in detail how this virus spreads [1]

- Washing hands and not touching face is inconclusive but it makes sense to keep up the hygiene. That's not the primary means of how this virus spreads.

- Virus primarily spreads via airborne means, simply by breathing (not even coughing or sneezing) is enough. It stays suspended in air (you can imagine the negligible weight of a 0.1um particle compared to the fluid mechanical forces from circulating air).

- N95 masks (contrarily to the popular myth) are the most effective means of stopping the spread. Shortage of masks for hospital workers is an orthogonal issue.

I urge everyone of you to watch this interview and to be more informed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3URhJx0NSw

Don't breathe either: The research, which was carried out by scientists from the National Institutes of Health, Princeton University and UCLA, suggests it's possible for the virus to spread through the air as well as through the touching of contaminated surfaces.

"Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for multiple hours and on surfaces up to days," researchers wrote in the study's abstract.

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2020/03/11/Coronavirus-can-...

Done with https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/train/image I bet. Love this thing. You can make your own 'Don't Touch Ya Face' in a few minutes!

With the pandemic of working from home, maybe we need an app to help us stop touching, eh, other bits of our anatomy?

Great idea. Also, after people become trained to change their behavior when hearing that Ralph "I'm in danger", start playing it periodically when people are on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

The world will be a better place.

Here's another idea:

Start wearing a bracelet or something else to give yourself a little reminder when you are reaching for your face. I have no idea whether bracelets themselves are germ traps, of course.

Also, wash your hands.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-10/how-south-east-asia-i...

This is cool but the downside of having a dell xps is that the camera is basically always looking at my hands :D... works fine if I'm not using the keyboard :)... or if I got up and actually went to my desk and that sort of thing..

A bit tangential, but I have a mild concern that the focus on hand / face transmission which is undoubtably valid may be encouraging people to overlook the fact that covid-19 is highly transmissable without any contact through air / droplets. Many cases have been documented where people were infected without contact. To avoid infection, you need to avoid being in close proximity, especially in enclosed environments, with large numbers of people.

My wife and I built something similar. Take a look: https://www.DontTouchFace.com

It's easy to trick by just having your hand anywhere in front of your face, even a foot away. Is this something current image classifier architecture could address with more data? It seems like it'd be hard to tell whether a hand is large and on a face, or small and far away from the face unless there is some sort of depth estimation going on (based on cues like shadows).

Maybe someone said in the comments somewhere, but it kind of makes me chuckle to sit here testing it by... well... touching my damn face.

I've touched my face while testing the app way more than I would have if I weren't aware of the app at all.

didn't even work on my machine but upvoted for FAQ

See also http://donttouchyourface.net/ from a few days ago. This could actually be an interesting case study in different implementations of the same tool.

I love it. I built something similar a few days ago.

https://twitter.com/andrew_n_carr/status/1237413723658055680...

>please listen to Goop product descriptions before me.

LOL - the FAQ is worth the price of admission

How about this solution: If your face itches or something, use the back of your hand to rub it? Or some other part of your body that you can be confident isn't used to touch anything potentially contaminated.

For those looking for an app that works while you use other apps: https://foundationlabs.io/face-no-touchy

Hey Y'all, I wrote something similar yesterday using Tensorflow.js https://face-palm.netlify.com/

The FAQs are amazing haha

My app works while you use other apps https://foundationlabs.io/face-no-touchy

This also seems really useful for people trying to stop biting their nails and other habits. Any chance you'd share the code?

I touched my face many times from many different positions to test it out. Mostly it didn't detect it. But fun times.

the funny thing is: this website made me touch my face wayyyy more than I would have otherwise today.

Is it just me or does opening this site in another tab on Firefox not run the warnings?

Have you considered open sourcing this so it can be ported to other platforms?

Now do it for bad posture plz

The app fails to even ask for camera permission in Firefox, and simply dies.