amber: a lip-picking detection web app

wish something would tell you when you were picking? here’s amber.

This is a project I’m currently working on for fun. I have dermatillomania, a condition where, according to the Cleveland Clinic, a person compulsively picks or scratches their skin, causing injuries or scarring. This occurs in a number of places, but my lips have always taken the brunt of it.

Most of my friends, especially ones from middle school and childhood, can probably recall my lips almost always being scarred. But most of the time, I didn’t even realize when I was picking until it was too late and my lips were bleeding.

Amber’s here to help me know that.

The idea for it first came up when I was so frustrated with my picking in a public setting. An idea came to mind–if I just perpetually kept my laptop sound audio at 100 and kept Amber running, I would have no choice but to remember not to pick. Otherwise, if I did, there’d be a nonzero chance a “wait wait wait wait what the-“ would play, and a certain chance some other GenZ audio would play. I realized that probably would be too disruptive.

So I made Amber to be that gentle reminder.

I wanted to know when I was picking in a fun, lighthearted way. I wanted to learn more about when I was picking at what times of the month. Was more picking correlated with higher stress? Were there moments when I barely picked?

There are three core features of Amber. The primary feature is the lip picking detection, where I use mediapipe and cv2 libraries to detect combinations of finger locations in relation to my mouth. The alert system is a combination of a pop up notification and a sound–one that you can customize. The existing 20 sounds that the alert can randomly choose from are all brainrot GenZ sounds that would make me (and hopefully people I’m in a room with) laugh. The second feature though, is a page that allows for more customization; for you to upload your own audio snippets or record your own in the web app. The third feature is to see how frequently you’ve picked. The picking history page allows you to view your data within different time frames to see when the highest frequency of picking has occurred.

Still working on this one in relation to another hardware project for dermatillomania and trichotillomania. Stay tuned for more!