IIT Kharagpur team develops app for elderly people

Kolkata, Jul 24: In a move to help geriatric care, students of IIT Kharagpur have built an app which will inform the caregiver when the elderly person falls down with the exact location.

Named 'CARE4U' the android-based app will connect the caregiver to the elderly person. The app have been built by an interdisciplinary team of the second year B-Tech students of the institute, an IIT Kharagpur statement said on Tuesday.

The network-based fall detection algorithm in the app installed on the phone of the elderly can detect whether the elderly has fallen down.

If there is a fall, it automatically calls the caregiver and emergency services along with the exact location of the elderly person.

CARE4U can also detect emotions and whenever the elderly opens the app, the phone takes his picture and a mood index is calculated.

This detects whether the person is sad or not and automatically updates the caregiver with the time stamp.

The caregiver can check what mood the senior citizen has been through in the day.

To make this feature more effective the team has developed a cognitive intelligent chatbot for the elderly person to engage with.

Team member Kanishka Haldar 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.

Fellow student from the same department, Aadi Swadipto Mondal explains the functioning of the app.

"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.

It has a 'Medicine Reminder' feature to remind both the elderly as well as the caregiver that it is time for the former to take medicine.

"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.