Real-Time Tracking of People With Dementia via Smart Watches: 3-Week Prototyping

Through collaboration with Hymux Technologies, the client secured a contract with a medical institution by delivering an application that aids in the care of individuals with dementia. Thanks to this partnership, the company swiftly transformed their concept into a fully functional product in just three weeks. Satisfied with the outcome, the client is now planning the development of a version compatible with Samsung-based smart watches.

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Customer

Based in Denmark, the customer is an IT engineering company developing wireless access and calling systems. The customer’s portfolio includes solutions for enterprises and institutions, offices and households, entertainment and sport venues, etc. The organization’s flagship product is a wireless, cloud-based calling system widely used by municipalities in Denmark and Norway. Among other things, the customer produces solutions for the healthcare industry.

Solution

The customer wanted to develop an application for Huawei smart watches that will help to track and locate people with dementia living at nursing homes. However, unlike most smart watch apps, this one had to work autonomously without a mobile phone connection.

The resulting app offers real-time location tracking, launching instantly on smart watches and operating independently without the need for mobile phone connection. A social worker starts the app, performs authentication to connect to a server, and sets up a user profile. Once the connection is established, the app will send frequent updates on its active status or warnings if a user is approaching/crossing the geofence zone.

Understanding the nature of dementia, our engineers developed a simple interface of analogue watches to avoid any difficulties in using. A person with dementia, however, can make use of an alarm button to send out a signal for help. 

Based on Firebase Cloud Messaging, the Hymux Technologies team built a control mechanism that allows the app to be managed from the server. For instance, it enables adjusting the frequency of updates sent by the app, checking its status, and requesting a user’s location at any given moment and a battery value. This helped to reduce requests to the app, thus, minimizing battery power usage. To enable proper operation of a GPS sensor, our developers implemented time-out intervals.

Challenges

In the course of the project, the Hymux Technologies team had to address a number of issues: 

– It was of the utmost importance to minimize power usage of the watches’ battery regardless of real-time GPS tracking. 

– Due to the limited functionality of the watches, a GPS sensor would not work inside the buildings, and it would take up to a minute for it to start when outside.

Team

• 1 Full-stuck developer
• 1 QA engineer
• 1 Project manager
• 1 UX/UI designer