Description as a Tweet:

Worried about leaving your child with a babysitter? You may have cameras, but can they see everything. Teeter Totter, like in a playground? No, its a small device that takes real-time data capable of sensing if your child is being well looked after

Inspiration:

What inspired us the most during our stay here at HackUMass VII, was the drive to push ourselves into doing a project outside our skill set . What we decided to do as a team was, find an issue in today's world we could possibility make a difference in by creating something in the allotted 36 hours. It was then that our idea sparked. A device that could track the safety of your child and alert you of possible harmful or dangerous situations your child may face while you're away from them, thus creation a sense of relief for said parent/parents. Most importantly increasing the safety of young children and newly born infants.

What it does:

Our project begins with a Texas Instruments CC2541 Sensor Tag. The sensor tag is then sewn into a baby's onesie or if the child is older, could also be attached to the exterior of their clothing. The CC2541 has the capability to collect IR Temperature, Ambient Temperature, Proximity, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Simple Keys, Humidity, Barometer, and Magnetometer data real time. For our project we focused on the Accelerometer, Gyroscope, and Ambient Temperature data that was being collected. The application Teeter Toddler does the rest, monitoring the data collected for any abnormalities or sudden changes in the babies movement which may indicate poor handling of the child, which may place the child in danger (Shaken Baby Syndrome). If the sensor detects such data, it immediately sends an audible notification alarm to the user informing them of the situation. The same is done with the Ambient Temperature data collected, if the baby is in a possible harmfully cold or hot environment, the user receives a notification to check on them. For temperature data, it is constantly being displayed to the user via the app. As the temperature falls or raises the app begins to alert the user via notifications, unless the temperature hits a dangers level and then the application sends an audible alarm. The goal here was to provided parents with protection and a sense of ease that their children are well taken care of in their absence in real time. That's not all, at first we look at this solution as a way to monitor others who look after our children but then came to a realization. The application could also be used in other ways, for instants. With the data being collected in real time, a new mother/father could use this same application to ensure safe handling of their child in their own hands. Also a growing problem we noticed in the news is the amount of cases where parents, perhaps due to stress or other factors, forget their children in the car during hazardous conditions. Teeter Toddler could be the determining factor in those precious few minutes of life or death, all with a simple yet accurate notification alert. With the Gyroscope and temperature data collected we could help prevent some of the top leading sleep environmental factors leading to Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Factors like the infant sleeping on their stomach or side. Babies placed in these positions to sleep might have more difficulty breathing than those placed on their backs, with the Gyroscope data we can help further prevent this. Another example is overheating, being too warm while sleeping can increase a baby's risk of SIDS. With both Ambient Temperature and IR temperature at our disposal, we could lower the number of cases reported with a simple app.

How we built it:

The CC2541 is a power-optimized true system-on-chip (SoC) solution for both Bluetooth low energy and proprietary 2.4-GHz applications. It enables robust network nodes to be built with low total bill-of-material costs. The CC2541 combines the excellent performance of a leading RF transceiver with an industry-standard enhanced 8051 MCU, in-system programmable flash memory, 8-KB RAM, and many other powerful supporting features and peripherals. We also experimented with other microcontrollers, but in order to keep it small enough to not be bothersome to the child and still big enough not to be a choking hazard we stuck with the CC2541. Once attached, the CC2541 begins to collect real time data and passes it along into our application. The application side was developed within Evothings Studios and Workbench. This allowed us to create an application capable to run in both Android and Apple Operating Systems using JavaScript and HTML. Libraries such as Easyble.js and Tisensortag.js played an instrumental role in our final product.

Technologies we used:

HTML/CSS
Javascript
Node.js
Microcontrollers
Other Hardware
Misc

Challenges we ran into:

With a collective of very little experience in hardware and application development, getting started was a lot hard than we first envisioned. Nevertheless we had a goal in mind and worked as a team to further strengthen ourselves more into the subject we knew could use some polishing. Documentation on the TI CC2541 sensor tag was difficult to find since the company has since released newer versions of the sensor tag. This made it particularly difficult for us to properly extract the information we needed, but with some heavy duty digging we were able to find what we needed to make it all come together.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

Since we are Cyber Security students, we normally only focus on cyber security related projects and it so happened that this year HackUMass had a prize category available just for that. Yet instead we took what was said at opening ceremony to heart and decided to try something new to all of us.Finding a real world problem and solving it with something we made. To come out of all of that after 36 hours of not sleeping with a working prototype couldn't make our team any prouder.

What we've learned:

Asking what we didn't learn would be a smaller response. Even though 36 hours doesn't seem like a long time, one can definitely feel it. Practically every piece required to make our project work, meant a team member/members stopping what they were doing to do an hour or two of research to continue to stride forward towards the finish line. The most valuable thing we learned this weekend is that just because we know how to find exploit and vulnerabilities in things like apps and hardware components. It is a totally different prospective in building them that requires additional knowledge.

What's next:

Our team has decided to continue with this project after HackUMass. We would like to find even more feasible applications for our project. We are already underway researching other alternatives in terms of hardware and would like to design a more durable and water proof case for our device. Thus making it washer and dyer friendly. Also making it difficult for unauthorized personal to remove or tamper with the device. Even though we collected a massive amount of data to design our projects baseline on readings, we would like to continue to do so in order to make our data even more accurate and effective. On the application side we would like to see more content for newer parents available. Links and resources to help them better look after their precious ones.

Built with:

HTML/CSS
JavaScript
Node.js
TI 2541 sensor tag
Evothings Studios
Evothings Workbench
Evothings Viewer
TI SensorTag Application
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
And Carl our CPR baby

Teeter Toddler