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Web app view
Inspiration
My child attends day care and we have no idea what is happening during the day (is she eating enough, is she sleeping enough) until we get a paper log sheet each night at pickup. The alternatives in market today are web and mobile apps that require the day care provider to look away from the children in their care and enter a bunch of details in a complicated app.
Day Carrier was designed to allow the day care provider to document the activities of the child by simply speaking to an Alexa-powered device. It also allows information that parents enter at home to be sync'd to the same digest of daily activities for the child.
What it does
Day Carrier supports 15 daily activities like diapers, naps, bottles, and meals and makes it instantaneously available to parents and caregivers via our web app.
It supports the ability to record an event at the current time or to record an event from earlier in the day. It also has the functionality for the care giver or parent to ask Day Carrier "when was the last time..." and get a response with the time since the last requested activity type (e.g. "when did Genevieve last take a nap?")
How I built it
The voice skill was build with the Alexa node.js SDK running on Amazon Lamdba. I built an API with Django, Django REST framework, and an OAuth library. The voice skill talks to the API to store the data.
The web application was build with speed of development and mobile support as the primary goals, so I used Bootstrap and jquery, calling the same API that the Alexa Skill uses.
The database has access permissions built in so that a parent can update activities for their child from their Alexa-powered device at home and have those same events available to the day care Alexa-powered device.
Challenges I ran into
A big issue I ran into was the Alexa Skills Kit does not support knowing the users timezone. So when I allowed the user to record an event in the past or to ask for the last time an event occurred, I had to assume the timezone from the browser upon account linkage and hope that was correct.
What I learned
Despite years working with APIs, this was the first time I had to write an OAuth client (to support account linkage), so that was a learning process.
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