PulseSafe

Inspiration

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally. One in five deaths is a heart attack, and performing CPR immediately can greatly improve these odds, yet ambulances may only arrive so fast. This project aims to quickly help those in need by alerting nearby individuals with first-aid training of the incident.

What it does

In order to provide support at the time of need, our app monitors real time heart rate and input data on a smart watch and allows the user to tap a button which would send notifications to nearby first-aid certified members, indicating an emergency . These registered members are trained CPR providers and the notifications will only be sent to members within a close distance to the person in need for help.

How we built it +

Challenges we ran into

One of the first challenges we ran into was coding on FibitOS using Fibit’s documentation, as we all carefully studied the documentation to program the app that would be installed on the watch. Additionally, the platform to test the app came with a simulator that was not equipped to handle API calls like an actual smart watch, which restricted the things we could test. Sending data from the sensor on the watch to a server took us a long time to figure out, with the console's unhelpful error messages. Lastly, we chose to implement a MERN stack as it was best suited to work with FitbitOS, yet we were all new to it. Our team had to learn the entire framework and libraries that we could use in the timespan of this hackathon. (Oh, and due to our collective lack of knowledge in git, we ended up making 7 copies of the repo!)

Accomplishments that we're proud of +

What we learned

We are all very proud and relieved that we were able to sort out our server issues, and learn the MERN stack in such a tight period of time. We still don't know where Tony went though..

What's next for PulseSafe

Our idea was not driven by monetary incentive, though we understand that without funding, we cannot scale PulseSafe to a national level. There are still various components of PulseSafe that need to be polished and securely implemented, however in the far future, one of our primary steps would be to create a watch/band personal to PulseSafe watch benefits for financial gains and so that users do not have to purchase an expensive watch just to gain access to our PulseSafe watch app.