Cane-9 | Devpost

Inspiration

Dementia is a chronic ailment that impacts 1 out of every 10 elderly individuals aged 60 or older in Singapore. Shockingly, 6 out of 10 of these seniors may encounter wandering incidents, putting them in harm's way and causing great anxiety for their caregivers. Given the rapidly aging population in Singapore, this problem is becoming increasingly worrying. Our team was motivated to create a device that can help caregivers swiftly locate lost patients and alleviate some of the stress associated with dementia care.

What it does

Our project consists of both hardware and software components. As we figured that a walking cane will be something a dementia elderly patient will carry when they wander, we have created an attachable device to fit onto this cane. This device contains a GPS tracker that can track how far an elderly patient is wandering away from its "Safe Zones" as dictated by the caregiver. This is where our software component comes in where we have created an app that continuously polls their location and would display an alert when the elderly leaves this "Safe Zone". The caregiver would then be able to activate the speaker on the cane which will continuously play a sound notifying passersby that he/she is a lost dementia patient and requires help. These passersby can then scan the QR code on the device and this will bring them to our curated webpage which displays critical information about both the patient and the contact information of the caregiver. The passerby would then be able to contact the caregiver and the caregiver, being assured that the dementia patient is safe and in good hands can deactivate the speaker.

How we built it

We split our group based on our specialties in certain fields. On the hardware side, some of us were in charge of acquiring the hardware components such as the cane, speaker, and Arduino as well as 3D printing the enclosure. On the software side, some of us focused on creating the mobile app using flutter and the webpage with react and tailwind while the rest of us focused on creating a database that encompasses all of the basic CRUD functions and real-time updates of databases using established software such as express.js, firebase, postgreSQL. We worked in an Agile Scrum environment where team meetings were frequent and cooperation was essential.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into were acquiring at late notice and the integration between the frontend and backend as well as with the software and hardware.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Managing to build an MVP within a day and picking up many new skills along the way in hardware and software. Additionally, it was also the first time doing a hackathon for some of our group members.

The integration with Geolocational tools and APIs within our project was a major hurdle that we collectively as a group managed to overcome as well, for its importance in the key functionalities of the application. Being able to pick up software skills in these domains was extremely valuable.

What we learned

Prior to the hackathon, our group was largely specialised in our respective fields (eg. hardware, software, backend and frontend etc.). For those who were more proficient in software, being able to experience and tinker with various hardware technologies like 3D printing and ESP32 were interesting to say the least. For those who were more proficient in hardware, building an entire full stack application from scratch was an eye-opening experience. In overall, the group gained a greater appreciation of the multidisciplinary nature of engineering and software development, and we believe that we are now more holistic in terms of our software and hardware skillsets as compared to before.

What's next for Cane-9

We're looking to add on more features to make the entire application more robust and more concrete. For instance, we're looking to incorporate push notifications into the flutter application, which will definitely enhance the utility of the product by leaps and bounds.