Inspiration
Every year, there are a countless number of seniors who are injured or worse because no one sends them help in the event of a fall. We know of seniors who lived alone, suffered from heart attacks, and could've been saved if they were immediately sent help. We want to make sure that these tragedies don't occur again in the future with the app that we created.
How it works
We used Android Studio to create this app and combine both the front-end and back-end code. The fall detector uses the phone's built in accelerometer to detect when the acceleration increases and comes to an immediate stop (what happens during a fall). Then, using the Google Maps API and the phone's GPS, we extracted the user's current location and sent a link of their current location to their emergency contacts via SMS. Their contacts will then be aware that the user of the app needs help.
Challenges I ran into
We had many challenges including the current location function. Initially, we wanted to solely use the GPS but it didn't work. We then switched it so that it used the Google Maps API instead. We also had some problems with putting the app together in terms of back-end and front-end.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud of being able to incorporate the phone's native Contacts and SMS functions into our app instead of using external APIs. This results in a more efficient app.
What I learned
We learned to always save a working copy of the app before we proceed and add additional functions to it.
What's next for Stay Up
We wanted to add a notification on the lock screen for the user so that even if the phone's screen is off, the phone would be waked and notified about a fall. To do this, a service would have to be created.
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