[vip_students] Student Project Update.

Hi all,

Just a follow up to you all in relation to the system being designed by 
students in engineering in N U I Galway to alert people to open doors etc. 
in their homes. Thanks again to all who kindly contributed in any way 
through email and phone calls, it was all invaluable to the students and 
having seen a working prototype of the system last week hopefully they can 
get a full working model developed. Below is a summary of the project and 
what they have developed. Considering that this is just one part of a very 
busy year in college I'm sure you'll agree it's an excellent piece of work 
and hopefully they can push on and develop something very worthwhile from 
it.

Thanks again to everyone,

Francis.

"HomeSense" - a home safety system for the blind.
Having spoken to Francis Kane, a representative for the NCBI Galway 
branch, we were informed that recently, a blind person had an incident in 
his kitchen where a visitor had left the dishwasher door open which he 
subsequently tripped over, sustaining serious injuries. Upon further 
investigation it became apparent that this is not an isolated incident and 
that many people have experienced this problem. This is an issue visually 
impaired people face which we felt needed to be addressed, especially in 
people who have become blind later in life and would not necessarily have 
the spatial awareness to find their way around their house safely.

Our solution involved attaching sensors to all doors and relevant 
appliances in the users home, creating a sensor network. When any door is 
open, this information is sent to a main base unit at the entrance to the 
room.
Upon entering the room, this information is sent to an Android application 
which warns the blind user if any potential hazards are present using TTS 
(Text-to-speech). The user may also interact with the application using 
voice recognition to ascertain if there are any current safety risks.

Should the user not have a phone in their possession, or if blind visitors 
are in the home, a backup system is in place in which the base unit itself 
can announce these hazards. HomeSense utilises ultra-low-power TI MSP430 
microcontrollers with proprietary RF transceivers for wireless 
communications and connects to the Android application via Bluetooth. 
Systems are also in place to deal with power outages, low batteries, 
sensor faults or phone hardware issues.

The application connects to the base unit via Bluetooth . Once the 
visually impaired user enters the room, a packet containing the sensor 
network data is sent to the phone. The acquired information is then used 
to populate an SQLite database. From here TTS is utilised to announce any 
potential hazards, if a sensor battery is low or if the network has any 
faults. The user also has the option of using voice recognition using the 
Google Voice search speech recogniser to find out which sensors are active 
without needing to navigate through the application visually.
As the end user is visually impaired, the user interface minimal and the 
Android operating system allows the application to be run as a background 
process.  The visual user interface itself is only for system 
configuration purposes such as the ability to change sensor locations, 
view the current status of the network and send commands to the base unit 
to configure embedded system settings.

We are also working on developing a website which allows the status of the 
network to be accessible online. 
This would make it possible to integrate the system with emergency to 
cater for injuries, or to contact carers in the event of an incident.

We're also investigating the possibility of using NFC (near field 
communication) to allow the application to be expanded for use in public 
services such as in bus stations, schools and libraries to give the 
visually impaired any information they should be aware of.



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