Inspiration
Not only are the elderly more vulnerable to the coronavirus, but lockdown restrictions have also made it harder for house nurses to take care of patients and our loved ones in need. The idea for Yours, truly arose from that exact necessity. Our compact and easy-to-use design helps take care of the emotional and physical needs of the elderly despite the barriers that exist in connecting with them today.
What it does
This is a pillbox that makes it easier for the user to remember to take their medication. By signaling with a red LED when pills need to be taken, it is impossible to be unsure whether the pills for the day were taken or not. If the red light is on, you need to take your medication. If the red light is off, you are good for the day! Additionally, it was the added special touch of allowing the family to connect with loved ones. You can remotely encourage and ensure necessary medications are taken, as well as send kind loving words to those important in your life.
How we built it
We built up the functionality by testing and then integrating each electronic component. The housing was designed in SolidWorks and 3D printed to the exact dimensions of the electronics. Finally, we built a website to send messages to the device in real-time.
Challenges we ran into
The first hurdle was figuring out a meaningful project that utilized the parts we had available. It took a lot of brainstorming but we eventually decided on a project that we are very proud of! The biggest challenge was getting the OLED panel to display text and, unfortunately, we were not able to do so.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to integrate our areas of expertise from Product Design to Front-End Web Development. By combining these skills, we created a product that solves a true need for people we care about. Nothing could be more inspiring for us :)
What we learned
There were a lot of wonderful learning points, as well as experience working together in a hardware project, but being in different places! The biggest learning points were certainly on Solidworks animations, and on troubleshooting an (unfortunately, broken) OLED screen.
What's next for Yours, truly
While we were able to make a lot of progress with the limited time, there are still things that we could certainly improve. For example, we would love to be able to send voice recordings to the Yours, truly user, and as such we would require implementing two new features. Firstly, added support on the firebase server to take in audio recordings, and secondly, added connectivity to a Bluetooth (or added) speaker in order to play these recordings out loud for your loved one. Additionally, we would love to have a microphone in the device, in order to record the user's reaction! Finally, an added extension would be to have similar features with image capture, hence being able to send reactions.
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