ALM8

Almost 50 Million people suffer from Alzheimer's and memory loss worldwide. Forgetfulness, impaired sense of direction, decline in precision of motor skills and wandering are common issues that the everyday dementia and Alzheimer's’ patient faces.We decided to take this problem upon ourselves and come up with an innovative solution.During our projects development, we came across Azure and we found that it had technologies that could be seamlessly integrated with our product and enhance it as well.After months of development we came up with our product, ALM8 - A virtual caretaker for Alzheimer’s patients to help them lead safer and more independent lives. The main features of our product are (1) Person Recognition - Here we have used Azure Face API to recognise familiar people that the user comes across, the camera is attatched to a raspberry pi module placed in the pocket.This helps Alzheimer’s patients better recognise their friends and family. (2) Wandering Detection - Here we have used geofences to detect when a patient is wandering, this is a very common symptom in Alzheimer’s patients and causes a lot of accidents as well.We setup geofences so that if a patient leaves a designated area, an exit event is detected and a notification is sent to the family members. (3)Fall Detection - Patients face a decrease in motor skills which often leads to falls and slips,ALM8 comes equipped with an accelerometer in the raspberry pi module that detects falls and sends notifications to the family members. (4)Saving Places - ALM8 lets the user save familiar places that they enter and later it can also guide the users to these places. (5)Medicine Reminders - ALM8 also helps in routine tasks like reminding a patient when a medicine is to be taken. (6)Seamless OCR integration - In order to further simplify things ALM8 has OCR technology integration in reading doctors prescriptions and reading signs for places as well. So ALM8 is the all-in-one solution for these patients and we hope that our product brings solace to millions of Alzheimer’s patients and their families worldwide and truly acts as a mate to Alzheimer’s patients. **Health and Safety** - To ensure that our product was safe and efficient for use by patients worldwide, we approached a medical doctor and asked her to verify the safety of the project. She wrote us a medical clearance letter which you can find here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/17r_7YPXY8M1UZvH7-OARbk3ib4BO3iyn_t2nEBTMTc0/edit?usp=sharing.

Hey! We are team ALM8, a duo of innovators and builders from India. We have created a project named ALM8, which stands for Alzheimer’s Mate. It is a virtual caretaker for Alzheimer’s patients all around the world. Our team’s duo consists of Anurag Parida (16) and Raghav Puri (16). We study in different schools and live about 40 km apart, but became great friends after we met at various inter-school technology competitions that our schools participated in. Both of us are proficient in different fields of the technological space. Anurag is proficient in web development and making mobile applications for Android. Raghav is experienced in web development and in all aspects of design, be it UI or UX. We were looking for a problem to solve, when funnily enough, we found a problem that had existed in Raghav’s family for years. Raghav’s grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, one day wandered far from their home and after getting lost, could not find her way back. She did not ask anyone for help and this resulted in panic in the household. The watchman found her and alerted the family. When asked why she hesitated to ask for help, she replied that she could not recognise anyone and hence did not want to ask a stranger for help. It later turned out after our research that this happened due to 2 symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, wandering and memory loss. When Raghav shared this issue with Anurag later that day, they realised that they must look to tackle the problems that their own family and their community was facing before moving to help the masses. They looked for a solution that would address most, if not all of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s – memory loss, unstable walking, impaired sense of direction etc. For Raghav, such a solution had to be cheap yet efficient and helpful. On finding no such solution in the market, we took this problem upon ourselves and decided to build ALM8. It was difficult at first, but we managed to pull through the hurdles and create a solution which consists of a Raspberry Pi device which connects to an Android smartphone through various Azure IoT Hub. It integrates various technologies to make the user experience as well as functionality of the system stand out. While developing this project we also bonded together over our common interests like technology, movies, businesses and politics. We are now confident about each other’s strengths as well as weaknesses and know how to make full use of our team’s skillsets. Both of us have evolved as individuals as well as a duo and have completely transformed from two friends who made small websites and apps for fun to two developers working hand in hand to develop a sustainable solution for the 10 million+ people who suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease every year. Our team’s greatest strength is that we are always ready to learn from the errors we have made, be it crashes during development or criticism from evaluators, and we have always given in our best to make the project the best that we can. By developing our project and taking it to the market one day, we aim to help the several millions of people who have been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease but lack a care-taking service simply because there is no technological solution and domestic care services are too expensive.