EmTag - if you fall

EmTag is a secure framework that stores emergency medical information on wearable NFC tags. In critical situations where you’re unconscious, EmTag provides lifesaving information to medical personnel.

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Inspiration

The first few minutes after a critical medical emergency are crucial for trying to save the patient. We wanted to propose a product that can earn medical teams a few precious minutes to save someone's life.

What it does

EmTag is a secure framework that stores emergency medical information on wearable NFC tags. In critical situations where the wearer is unconscious, EmTag provides lifesaving information to medical personnel.

The EmTag software provides reading and writing capabilities to wearable NFC tags. It stores the user's name, blood type, emergency contact number, birth date, allergies, and medical history all within an NFC tag. It also encrypts the data with AES-CTR cryptography so that sensitive data is not readable by anyone other than medical personnel with access to the EmTag software.

EmTag is a game-changer for vulnerable groups such as those prone to seizures, the elderly, and children. It can also enhance safety for travelers separated from their party, those engaging in extreme sports, and many others.

How we built it

EmTag is a Python full-stack software. We used Python's libraries to ensure functionality for complex processes such as monitoring connections to our NFC reader software and handling cryptographic operations. We also made use of PyQt for the front end.

EmTag is built and tested with the ACS ACR122U NFC card reader. Tags used during development are NTAG213 stickers with 137 bytes of memory each. We specifically selected smaller tags with less storage to make our design more compact.

Challenges we ran into

Although NFC technology is simple at a glance, it utilizes multiple well-established communication protocols to function correctly. In the short time frame that we had, we were pressed to quickly familiarize ourselves with the involved protocols. Many of these protocols involved lower-level operations that we were not familiar with.

We also had to select an encryption algorithm that could keep user data safe and keep the size of the data small enough to be stored in a tag.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our original goal had been to implement the software without encryption and propose security as a feature to be developed in the future. However, we pushed ourselves to complete the encryption and decryption functionalities.

What's next for EmTag

EmTag needs more robust security functionality to be ready for potential distribution to medical personnel. A login system for medical personnel is necessary. We also only considered the situation where medical information could be read by a third party but did not consider if the information could be altered. In the future, the EmTag team aims to research NFC technology to only allow read-write operations from specific hardware. Other security measures can also be employed, such as check-sum bits.

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