Sahana’s grandmother accidentally disabled her WiFi and was quietly living without internet until Sahana came for her regular visit in the weekend. Stella's boyfriend gets weekly phone calls from his parents on how to fix their 'broken' smart appliances and devices. As IoT transforms our homes, some of our loved ones that need the benefits of IoT are left behind. So that's how the idea of building the Digital Grandchild was born to solve this problem.
What it does
The Digital Grandchild proactively solves the problems that arise in our integrated 'smart homes' from the smart TV to the smart Fridge, and even the smart PillBox. A simple touchscreen interface customized for our most tech-challenged family members gives them the ability to get support from Rogers to get their 'broken' smart TV to work again. A key part of Digital Grandchild is the ability of your tech-challenged family member to remotely get your personal help, as a concerned Caregiver, through Rogers' secure network in a simple interactive interface. Then stage two will use machine learning to recognize the common patterns of problems for tech challenged customers and proactively solve these problems before they even occur. And finally, we have the Rogers customised care center for this segment, to deliver their services through their helplines.
How we built it
We built a working prototype model of the Digital Grandchild touchscreen interface with InVision. We designed the UI and images in PowerPoint and drawn models in a sketch-board. We used the Design Thinking process (e.g. post-it notes on the wall) to narrow down the real problem we needed to solve.
Challenges we ran into
We struggled to agree on the real problem we needed to solve. We each had different solutions for how we viewed the problem because our diverse five person team included MBA bank managers, engineers and a UI designer. We interviewed dozens of people (participants, mentors, and friends) to learn more about the problem and was surprised that almost everyone had their own personal story. But this is what validated our need to build the Digital Grandchild! Then we applied design thinking during a workshop we attended to finally discover the real need and problem we should solve, and most importantly - keep this human-centered while still in the middle of "Tech"-Jam.
We spent so much time arguing on the problem we had to rush development of the Digital Grandchild application. We only had enough time to prototype the key functionalities of the app. We are still not sure if the app will make an external phone call during the live demo (our backup plan is someone will make a call from the audience). We also decided to table making the machine learning model because of time constraints and lack of needed data sets.
One of our team members got food poisoning on Saturday morning and had to go home. Our priority was to make sure she was okay (she's okay now).
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We all became emotionally invested on the Digital Grandchild project. There was a lot of moments when someone said I wish we had this available when my Dad was sick or for my grandma. We are most proud when people we interviewed got excited and told us how useful Digital Grandchild would be in their lives. We arrived at our three key pillars that would drive the model of the Digital Grandchild - (1) Providing Proactive & Reactive Help (2) Develop a Connected Ecosystem of Stakeholders (3) Lead with Simplicity and Convenience.
What we learned
Food poisoning sucks!
Working in a diverse team, tech and non-tech, is harder but leads to great results. We were able to think through all the aspects of the solution, from the emotional touchpoints to the actual technology user-interface; we believe this as made our solution holistic but focused.
The smoked beef ravioli is delicious.
What's next for Roger That! Folks
Make the working application and M/L model (with toy data sets). Then see how we can integrate this to personal medical devices and support Telemedicine. For example, grandma automatically gets a call from her Doctor because there is an issue with her insulin pump. We also see great potential for targeting our Caregivers (in the age range of 40 to 60) who represent the revenues in pipeline.
Built With
- html
- invision
- ios
- numpy
- python
- rogers-privacy
- rogers-user-profile
- tensorflow
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.