Inspiration
My grandma turned 80 years old this summer. After a hard life through World War II, years of civil wars, cultural revolution, famines, ovary cancer, and deafness, she still remains in her great spirit and proudly lives in her old home by herself far away from us. Although I admire her strong will and positivity, I cannot stop worrying about her. Is she doing okay? Did she remember to take her medication this morning as the doctor prescribed? Did she fall again? Last year she fractured her left arm when she fell on the stairs. I wished there was some kind of system in place to keep her safe and alert me in the case of an emergency. I realized that I am not alone. Many Americans worry the same way for their beloved parents and grandparents who live alone by themselves. As a matter of fact, currently baby boomers – those age 65 and older – make up over 17% of the United States population. Every day, over 10,000 boomers are retiring. Many of them choose to live at their own home by themselves, instead of living in assisted living facilities, because of their preference for freedom, and because of the ever-rising cost of assisted living. In North Carolina, the average monthly cost of a typical assisted living care runs at $5,760 per month, or nearly $70,000 annually, whereas the average social security paycheck runs at only $1,828 per month. Seniors living by themselves at home do face many risks. These range from falls and injuries, to medical issues, and even burglaries. This inspired us to create our free app, SeniorSafe. It provides a monitoring and safeguarding system for seniors living alone, by connecting them with their local support network, including their loved ones. Through many advanced features including AI-enabled fall detection, 24/7 monitoring, a notification alert system, integrated medical and medication history tracking, customized health information and reminders, our application can act as a safeguard for seniors living alone at home.
What it does
Our app, SeniorSafe, aims to provide a free, 24/7 monitoring system that is secure, reliable, and easy to use for seniors who live alone.
With baby boomers starting to retire, more and more seniors choose to live independently in their own homes instead of in assisted living facilities. This is due to the ever-rising cost of assisted living, and because of their preference for individual freedom. The app comes with many advanced safety guarding and alerting features such as AI-enabled fall detection. This enables seniors to maintain their independence and freedom at home, without the worry of being unattended in case of falls, medical emergencies, or other accidents. SeniorSafe allows seniors to pre-select their trusted caregivers as their emergency contacts to receive alerts during accidents. The caregivers can be their children, local community volunteers, doctors, local medical facilities, etc. By connecting seniors in need with their trusted local support network, seniors could get faster care and support whenever it is needed. Family members can also remotely check on their elderly parents’ or grandparents’ status anytime through the motion detector camera or video call features.
In addition, the app provides an easy-to-use platform for seniors who are not necessarily tech-savvy. It allows them to store and track their medical data and medication history, sends tailored health tips and reminders to improve their awareness, and can quickly share medical history with doctors and hospitals during medical emergencies where every second counts.
Challenges we ran into
Even though we had a very clear vision of our app and knew what critical functions it needed to have, we ran into many technical difficulties while programming. The biggest difficulty we had was ensuring the app runs reliably across the web. We tried to make the app easy to use and requires minimum technical knowledge to navigate effectively, as many seniors are not necessarily tech savvy. AI-enabled fall detection has also been a challenge to us. While motion detection inside home is fairly common, the difficulty is how to differentiate an accidental fall from normal everyday activities of a moving person. Fortunately, our extensive experience with AI detection in other projects allowed us to apply those insights and implement an AI-powered motion detection system capable of distinguishing between falls and normal activities. The third programming challenge we had was to create a video call feature using a server - client system. We started off with some problems in relation to the hosting on the server end, but we managed to resolve it. In addition, we worked on implementing an alert feature via email and text messages. We experimented with Twilio to enable sending messages to cell phones across different carriers, but it had too many problems related to authentication. Through these technical difficulties, we learned a lot of new programming knowledge during the development of our app.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What I enjoyed most about the app development process was refining the AI-enabled fall detection system and designing an accessible interface for seniors. Solving the challenge of distinguishing normal movements from falls deepened my understanding of AI integration and real-time data processing. Simplifying the user interface for seniors improved my UI/UX skills by focusing on clarity and accessibility. These experiences strengthened my technical abilities and problem-solving mindset for future projects.
What we learned
We learned to use Github, as well as the importance of using commits, pushes, and pulls correctly. In the beginning our repository was incredibly messy since our commits just included vague messages of what changes were made. We cleaned everything up to make a more organized project. We also learned important problem solving techniques through collaboration. By approaching the problem from different angles that only came from different people helped us create solutions we wouldn’t have found by ourselves. For example, our entire app idea came from one of our team member’s personal anecdotes. We also learned the importance of teamwork by focusing on our strengths, and helping each other fix bugs. Our app wouldn’t be nearly as good without the contributions of our current team members. These skills are already becoming very useful in my academic life and beyond. Take my computer science class, we use Github for each and every homework assignment. We’ve also started on an arcade game group project which has gone well thanks to my nearly learned skills from this initiative. Additionally, this extends outside of computer science, impacting my contributions in robotics, sports, and school.
What's next for SeniorSafe
If our team were to make a 2.0 version of SeniorSafe, one of the areas which we would improve on is the user interface design. We would start off by researching what seniors usually struggle with technology-wise. Then, try to take any of those unnecessary complexities out of our app. Incorporating accessibility features such as voice commands or screen readers would also make the app more inclusive for users with disabilities. We would also expand on our motion detection system. We could train the AI to recognize certain postures that could be related to a medical emergency. This way, caregivers could better respond to the crisis at hand. We would also add on to our medical dashboard. This dashboard would allow the senior to upload medical history, and the volunteer to be able to access it, all in one place. We could also connect our app with fitness trackers, enabling more detailed health monitoring. Given the sensitive nature of healthcare data, we also want to implement methods to protect user data. Secure data storage would ensure that user information remains confidential and protected from unauthorized access.
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