HappyWalrus: A Computer Vision App that Helps Parents Identify and Mitigate Kitchen Hazards

In an instant and without leaving his/her home, a young child can fall from a chair, shock himself with an electrical outlet, or pull a pot of boiling water from a stovetop onto a sibling with life-altering — or potentially fatal — consequences.

HappyWalrus is an easy-to-use babyproofing app that employs artificial intelligence (AI) to highlight common kitchen hazards in user-provided images. It suggests measures that caregivers can employ to mitigate potential dangers, with the aim of reducing the rate of childhood injury in children ages 0-4 (currently ~1.4 million emergency department visits per year in the US).