Home Assistance Help Alert Senior Design Project
Engineering
CMPE/EE 129 A/B/C
The fundamental idea behind the Home Assistance Help Alert System is to provide an affordable means of protecting the health, welfare, and safety of elderly people through an active help alert wireless network, with the senior residents of the De Anza Santa Cruz Mobile Home Park serving as our customers. Our project is sponsored by Professor Emeritus Don Wiberg and its purpose is to design a help alert system for senior citizens to summon neighbors, not ambulance or fire truck, when a senior person falls and cannot get up. Current devices on the market charge subscription fees for services which place considerable economic strains on seniors, despite many having limited income, and they also summon a 911 emergency call. This device aims to be a low cost, single-purchase alternative without a subscription fee, helping to connect the community through shared responsibility. Our goal is to design a system for under $100 so seniors can affordably summon each other for assistance, allowing for flexibility in determining if further medical help is necessary. The final design will be compact in the form of jewelry which can be worn either as a necklace or a bracelet. A detailed open-source design document of our project will then be made available to the public for non-profit entities to expand upon it. The system is composed of a button connected to a base station via Bluetooth wireless communications. The base station is then connected to other nearby base stations over a wireless mesh network to facilitate long-range communications, allowing the system to operate without a pre-existing communications infrastructure. Seniors will be able to choose which neighbors will be contacted first, second, and so on. The button, worn by the user, will be pressed to send the emergency signal to the corresponding base station box in his or her home. That base station will connect and send the help signal to neighboring base stations, alerting others of the emergency. Those base stations will then connect with their own corresponding buttons, alerting the wearer that a specific neighbor in the area needs help. The base station will provide a simple, intuitive interface to easily pinpoint the household in need of assistance.
