FamilyHealthWatch

Inspiration

Health begins at home, healthy families mean healthy communities, healthy communities lead to healthy cities, and healthy cities pave the way to healthy countries. Family members are the ones that care the most about our health. Our grandparents and elderly loved ones live far away from us and often alone. Their mobile phones, blood pressure meters, blood glucose meters and other such devices give and record diverse health data and are connected to the internet. We want people to be able to monitor the health of their loved ones remotely and provide the help that is needed.

What it does

FamilyHealthWatch has individual dashboards for every person in the family. These dashboards visualize the health data collected by the smart devices and wearables. Our app also has a smart comprehensive dashboard that shows all family members' health data and gives intuitive notifications to the user, all of this in a simple and easy to use web application.

Elderly people have a lot of health problems both physically and mentally that they do not disclose. However, their need can be identified by observing abnormalities in their step count, blood glucose levels, heartbeat, medication, sleeping habits, activities etc. It also gives the locations of doctors/hospitals around, their upcoming doctor appointments on a calendar and a super easy platform to chat with your loved ones. You can also set your activity goals in the personal dashboard.

Challenges we ran into

When dealing with health data, there are tons of implications about how to collect the data, how that data can be stored and transmitted. Human API is a third-party API provider which is responsible for the integration of data from various devices collecting them in a secure way and encrypting the data in the cloud. We query the Human API the data we need via a secure HTTP connection for the data we need which authenticates the users via an access token. We DO NOT store any data on the system, the data we get from Human API is used to build a mathematical model that can be used for detecting patterns in the data, predict trends and abnormalities etc.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Elderly parents living alone and far away is a common scenario in both high-income and low-income families, sensors are getting cheaper and cheaper and a device that measures the blood glucose/blood pressure is $30, step count and heart rate tracking devices come for as low as 15$, when so much of data is available, people should be able to take good care of their loved ones and help them remotely. There are apps like FitBit social and Apple Activity sharing, which add competitive value to improve health but there is no app that is exclusively for family and loved ones, adding to the care-giving and motivational value.

Whats next for FamilyHealthWatch

The widgets that our dashboard can handle cannot be just limited to wearables, if integrated with the motion, temperature and air quality sensors in the house, more information can be used to build models which enable better prediction of trends.