Hackaday Prize Entry: Personal Guardian Keeps An Eye Out

The Personal Guardian is a wearable tracking and monitoring device intended to help vulnerable people. The project goal is to allow these patients as much independence and activity as possible without a caregiver needing to be present. Wearing a sensor package might allow a memory care patient (for instance) greater freedom to wander.

The device consists of an Arduino 101 development board with a GSM shield that it uses to send SMS messages to the caregiver — for instance, if the accelerometer shows the patient fell over, or moved beyond certain GPS coordinates. Furthermore, the care-giver can monitor the device to determine the device’s status, and sees the patient’s heart rate thanks to a BLE sensor strap.

The patient can also press a panic button or toggle through a series pre-set SMS messages. In terms of complexity, the project’s creator [Ray Lynch] intended the interface to be simpler than a smart phone.

14 thoughts on “Hackaday Prize Entry: Personal Guardian Keeps An Eye Out

  1. The prototype looks to be a little on the bulky side, but a good first start.

    I guess the next step now is to port the code to a smaller and more readily available dev board. If they’ve done the job right, it won’t matter that it was originally coded for the Intel Curie as the Arduino HAL should allow it to move across to something ARM or AVR based fairly easily.

      1. Not quite… most of the telcos in this country claim coverage of over 90% of the population… Lora doesn’t.

        A Lora radio on its own does not make a comms link. The GSM network isn’t infallable but it will work in more places, more often, than Lora without special prior arrangement.

        I would suggest Lora in addition to GSM. When Lora nodes are detected, it can shut down GSM and save batteries by using Lora. When Lora is out of range, it goes looking for GSM. There’s a reason I go cycling with both a 4G mobile phone and a (actually two, a mobile station and a hand-held) multi-band radio transceivers.

    1. Modern GPS receivers do work decently well indoors depending on the building construction/design. GPS receivers have come a long, long way from the late 90’s early 2000’s when you had to have a clear view of the sky to get a decent fix. I had a Garmin receiver that would struggle to get a power-on lock sitting on a windowsill. Now I have an activity tracking watch that takes ~15 seconds to get a GPS lock inside my house.

  2. http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Mini-Global-Locator-Real-Time-Car-Kids-Pet-Tracker-GSM-GPRS-GPS-Tracking-Device-/122259887751

    There’s an emergency sequence when you press the button on it to send a predefined message, a MCU soldered to the button legs with a sensor axis or tilt etc rehouse in new shell win

    Run a little server with rooted android phone that can poll via sms, so those with area restrictions are polled more frequently the closer to a boundary they get some using average walk distance etc.

    Any old box with Linux USB and 1 network port and a rooted cheap android phone for SMS ADB for polling the devices it has a microphone which can be called to hear what’s going on also.

    It’s a pretty nifty thing though mic gets muffled if in pocket.

  3. What is a “memory care” patient? Is this word the newest creation of political-correctness fanatics, an euphemism, perhaps for dementia (Alzheimers disease), like using “special..something” instead of “disabled”?
    Why do some people continuously invent new euphemisms?

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