Guardii

• 

  WE

Inspiration

As we were reading the news, we noticed that females feel more unsecured walking alone at night. Nowadays, major news websites frequently report cases of women walking alone at night disappearing and being killed. We who are also women, seeing this kind of problem resonated with us and inspired our idea of ​​wanting to invent the "Guardii" device to reduce the risks of women in danger.

What it does

Our solution uses the heart rate sensor positioned on the fingertip as an input device to detect pulses. Our Python program then calculates the average of the user's first 2 minutes' pulses and store it as the resting pulse. Afterwards, pulses reading from the sensor are received, and the rolling average is calculated and recorded using the most recent 20 datasets. If the rolling average varies with a resting pulse by 40 beats per minute (bpm), the output devices, red LED and buzzer, will alert the user's emergency contact of a potentially dangerous situation. The emergency contact has to call the user to ensure his/her safety, then the output devices can be turned off by pressing the attached button. Upon detecting, the program also records real-time datasets into a file, as well as a pulse vs. time graph, so it would be convenient for the possible need of tracking criminal offenses.

How we built it

We used a Seed Ear-clip heart rate sensor as the input device, and a virtual Raspberry Pi 4 Emulator attached with a pulse sensor, a red LED, and a buzzer as the output device set.

Challenges we ran into

Testing the feasibility of our program was an important part of our project, as individuals have different resting pulses, yet finding real data of different individuals was difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming in with different educational backgrounds, our team was proud to demonstrate the perfect collaboration. Each team member utilized their technical skills, such as coding, business analysis and film processing to accomplish our team goal and eventually develop our solution.

What we learned

During this hackathon, we realized that women walking alone in the darkness is still a serious issue globally. This phenomenon happens every day and everywhere. Therefore, it is an honor to have such an opportunity to develop a technical solution that is able to protect women. By attending the workshops we gained experience with all sorts of perspectives, and we also learned through collaborating as a team by sharing ideas and challenging ourselves to explore then develop the best outcome.

What's next for Guardii

In the future, we plan to further improve Guardii by:

• developing an APP to integrate the device with software, so the output would be portable and easily accessible for the user's emergency contact
• making the input pulse sensor not as obvious, and make it appealing (e.g. wrist bands, scrunchies, watches, rings, etc.)
• optimizing the algorithm

We also plan to lunch our product by:

• co-operating with police stations to send out signals faster in order to better protect the user
• seeking funding from local universities and big tech companies -social media platforms to advocate for our solution

Built With

• python
• raspberry-pi