Hilfsbereit

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Inspiration

Our team started off with the intent to help senior citizens act more independently. One of our team members has personal experience with helping senior citizens. One of the prime problems caretakers face when caring for seniors is that when a senior requests help from a caretaker, the only method of communication they have and/or are familiar with is a pager. However the pager merely signals the senior has a need for assistance, it provides no indication of additional items to bring, level of urgency, etc. Our app, Hilfsbereit, aims to provide an intuitive communications interface between senior, who find technology burdensome, and their caretakers, who require more organization of senior request to improve efficiency. The app is named after the German word hilfsbereit which literally translates to ready to help; Hilfsbereit's goal is to allow seniors to have a connection to a helping hand, no matter where they are.

What it does

Hilfsbereit is a Natural Language Processing medical communications device that translates a senior's natural speech into concrete requests for assistance to their caretaker. This will provide an intuitive input method for seniors while also improving efficiency for the caretakers.

How we built it

We built Hilfsbereit on top of Google's Actions-on-Google API, DialogFlow, Firebase, and Google cloud funcitons to integrate it into any messenger app, primarily Facebook messenger. We utilized Google's powerful Natural Language Processing API, Firebase cloud database, and Webhook's dynamic intent detection to quickly parse requests and deliver messages to caretakers.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting the Firebase database and ensuring synchronization between communications and database memory, while learning new cloud technology principles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of how the Machine Learning algorithm can dynamically learn new commands we didn't input initially.

What we learned

We learned Cloud databases, Natural Language Processing, and extracting intents from utterances in speech.

What's next for Hilfsbereit

We plan to make Hilfsbereit compatible with Google Home and Google Home mini's to make senior-to-app interactions even more seamless. As of now, Hilfsbereit is still in an alpha stage so only approved testers and administrators can play-test the app, but we hope that it can become fully operational in the very near future. The team also had to cut judging the urgency of a request from the development plan due to time constraints, but we see this as an invaluable feature and are extremely eager to implement it given a more lenient time frame.

Built With

• google-cloud-functions
• google-cloud-messaging
• google-web-speech-api