Inspiration
Our team is passionate about creating technology for good, with a keen interest in accessibility projects. Our members also have experience with being, and caring for those with chronic illnesses. It can be tough to maintain independence whilst staying safe. Our product helps you to stay safe, and independent in your home, as well as helping carers to help those they love.
What it does
The main goal of this project is to allow people with chronic illnesses to be able to live independently and safely at home, while maintaining a high level of privacy. We also offer a lot of customizations, so that users' life choices are respected. Our project consists of an interactive hardware and software solution. The hardware piece contains a Raspberry-Pi and Arduino board linked to several sensors to detect distress signals at a vulnerable person's home. It is connected to an Azure web app, where carers, friends or family can log in and have updates in real time. If an emergency signal is detected, they will also receive an SMS to notify them using Twilio.
The hardware piece offers the following features:
- Water sensors, to detect whether the bath, or sink, is overflowing.
- NFC card reader, to allow entry to the home for a carer in case of an emergency, as well as having a record of carers who visited the home.
- Number pad, to make emergency calls, send emergency signals, or deactivate an emergency signal.
New features to be added:
- Temperature sensors, to detect too high/too low temperatures in the home.
- CO2 sensors, to detect dangerous levels of CO2 in the home.
- Noise sensors, to detect yelling/abnormal incidents.
- Wearable piece with single emergency distress button.
How we built it
The hardware piece was built using a Raspberry-Pi 2, Arduino Uno, sensors and a laser cut black PVC box (custom-made). It was connected to an Azure database, which updated the Azure web app continuously. It was also connected to our Twilio account to allow phone alerts. The software part of the project was hosted on Microsoft Azure and was built using c#, c++ and Python, the web app itself was built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript (React). The web app also has a continuous deployment feature.
Challenges we ran into
Accessibility considerations for ease of use, and maintaining privacy for user.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.