Kolkata: An interdisciplinary team of the second year B-Tech students of IIT Kharagpur have built an app that comes as a boon to the elderly. It enables relatives and the caregiver to know the exact location. ‘CARE4U’ the android-based app will connect the caregiver to the elderly person.
The network-based fall detection algorithm in the app installed on the phone of the elderly can detect whether the elderly has fallen down. When there is a fall, it alerts the caregiver and emergency services.
Not just this, CARE4U detects the state of mind and emotions of the aged, takes a photo from the phone and calculates the mood index. This goes a long way in helping the caregiver to gauge the mood of the person and take appropriate action.
There is also a cognitive intelligent chatbot for the elderly person to engage with.
Kanishka Haldar, a team member from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering IIT KGP says, “We customized it to recognize the current mood of the person and, accordingly, fine tune its conversations with that of the person. For example, the chatbot can recommend a motivational quote or an old song when the person is sad.
Aadi Swadipto Mondal says, “The best thing about our app is that except for the chatbot, all other machine learning models run on the mobile itself, so no cloud service is needed. Even if there is no internet connection, all other features such as fall detection, emotion detection will work,” he says.
CARE4U can also do a plethora of other day-to-day activities like make a call, send a text, book a cab and so on.
The app also has a record of medical histories, allergies’ account, an SOS button, real time location tracking and so on.
“To make a list of the medicine, all one has to do is take a photo of the medicine. The image-to-text recognition algorithm automatically detects the name of the medicine and adds it to the list. The user then just needs to set the time at which the medicine has to be consumed,” explained team member Partha Sarathi Roy from the Dept of Geology and Geophysics.
