Inspiration: Many of our teammates currently have loved-ones that are receiving continuous care either in their homes or in facilities. We've experienced frustration with the difficulty of coordinating communication across multiple members or the relative's support system. Calling everyone to see who has checked in on our loved-one and when can be a very time intensive process.
What it does: Our application facilitates that communication across the the entire support network in an unobtrusive way. After a minimum amount of setup to create an account for the patient or loved-one on Care Circle, a list of known visitors can be created and linked to a Bluetooth Device ID. Then whenever any of those visitors stops by to visit the patient, the device running the application will pick up their Bluetooth signal and create a log of their visitation. This then allows concerned relatives or care givers to login to the site and see a history of who has checked in on the loved-one needing care without having to call numerous people to reach the same answer.
How we built it: We built our application using the MEAN stack. Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node. We also incorporated a node package called Noble to handle the bluetooth scanning and parsing. We took an agile approach and created a Kanban board populated with User Stories in order to manage distributing work among team members.
Challenges we ran into: Integrating with Bluetooth technology was not something anyone on our team had ever tackled and working with the package proved rather difficult.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: We are incredibly proud of having successfully integrated Bluetooth scanning into our application. The first time a registered user got in range of the device running the application and a visitation log populated the screen was the most satisfying part of the project.
What we learned: Some of our teammates were unfamiliar with Angular and Node, and learned a lot about using them from others who had some experience. The entire team learned a lot about Bluetooth technology and the specs behind it. We also learned a lot about working with each other as a team and level setting expectations of a MVP.
What's next for Pharm Animals: If given more time the next phase of the project would incorporate integrating with the Alexa and like devices. When a visitor has been sensed as present in the home they would be able to say certain key phrases such as "Gave grandma her medicine" and a log detail would be recorded with that information.
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