Inspiration
Jeffrey’s grandmother once accidently fell in the field during a nightwalk. The family spent a nightand called the police to find her. The family was so worried about her that the his grandmother wasn’t allowed to have a nightwalk since then. Jeffrey shared his story with the group and we think, why not build a portable device that could detect health emergency by a senior and send alert to his/her family and friends? Here’s how Cura comes.
What it does
Cura serves as a wrist band that could detect health emergency. Once Cura detects user falling or having a heart arrhythmia, it could send a SMS with location to the user’s emergency contact. The user can also push the emergency button when he or she feels uncomfort to alert the contact.
How we built it
We built the product from both software and hardware aspects. From hardware aspect, we utilize arduino uno as our main board with our accelerator, pulse sensor, ESP-8266 12-e Wifi modulel and battery. For the purpose of portability and size-controlling, we add an extension bread board to the arduino board to allow all of accessories situated at a small space collectively. Especially, we connect arduino uno with ESP-8266 board to allow the falling signal generated at arduino board to ESP-8266 module, which, once receive the signal, will call for twillio’s api to send emergency message to family members of the elder. In addtion, we implemented a geolocation detection api from unwiredlabs to include a geolocation of the wearer, so that the position could be included in the message sent. We also set up a button for directly control the message sending instead of passively sending message after falling. From software aspect, we use arduino IDE to write ino files and upload them to our arduino board and ESP-8266 module. We write codes for heart beat detection, falling detection, data transfer, and message sending functionalities. After successfully uploading our code to boards, they won’t need any usb connection with the computer and therefor, with the support of battery charge, can work individually.
Challenges we ran into
We had trouble locating the right pin for digital input and output for the ESP8266 module. On ESP8266, D0 represents pin number 15, D2 represents pin number 5, you get the idea. They don’t match up. In the testing phase, we do not have this in mind. The result being that the module ESP8266 and Arduino Uno cannot comminucate correctly. Communication between the two boards is also a challenge. We initially used Serial package to write and read input/ouput, then we used a package called Wire.h which had the problem of only printing on monitor but not receiving data. In the end we solve the problem using digital read and write function.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We make the fall detection more accurate and avoids wrong alert. The accelerometer must receives a lower g when falling, a reverse spike in g when hit the ground, and no change in g for a time period, suggesting the user is lying on the ground.
What's next for Cura
We plan to collaborate with medical insurance companies so that Cura can send emergency team when user reported.
Additionally, more health index could be added to Cura, such as temperature of the user. In this way, users could be notified with a more well-rounded analysis of their medical conditions.
Last but not least, AI precaution could be incorporated into Cura. It could learn pattern that leads to a health emergency from all users, give warning to users when discovered similar pattern, and even prevent emergency from happening
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