Safety Guard

SAFETY GUARD

Motivation

On campus, UCI students have the privilege to ride their bikes in some area of the campus. However, if students are rushing to their next classes, bike accidents happen in the Aldrich Park very often. Fortunately, our device allows us to report and resolve a bike crash incidents immediately. Therefore, our device can not only contact for assistance when bike accidents happen, but also reduce the disturbance of students traveling to their classes.

Requirements

We will need vibration sensor, which acts as an input to measure the vibration of the accident. We will also need an Arduino board, which will be the control of communicating from the inputs to the outputs. In addition, we will need Bluetooth module to connect the Arduino board with a mobile device in order to make our device portable. At last, we will need a mobile device to connect with our device in order to contact for help when accident occurs.

Objectives

The main objectives of our project are reliability, accuracy, and low cost. Because our product measures the vibration and will be placed on cars or bikes, it can obtain a lot of vibration while running. Therefore, our device needs to be durable and reliable, which will not be damaged easily or have issues with obtaining the amount of vibration. The main point of our project is to create a product that can call 911 based on the frequency of vibrations that appears in an injured accident, therefore the devices need to transmit accurate vibration data. We will make our device as small as possible so that it will not be the  perfect size for user to carry it at all times but also save the cost of assembling it.

Flow Description

                      Figure 1: Flow chart of our Behavioral Specification

Users use their mobile devices to connect to device through the bluetooth, which requires passcode to log in. Then they use an app, which to control the device on their phone to obtain the data from vibration sensor. Base on the data which get from measuring vibration, the app will pop up warning and call for help (SOS).

Communication Description

Vibration sensor and bluetooth module are attached to MCU board in order to make the sensor device. The vibration sensor will create the database by measuring the vibration and store them in the flash drive. Because of the bluetooth module on sensor device, it supports the sensor device to connect to user device (smartphone) in order to send to the database. The database will be processed by an app on a mobile device.

Tools

To configure the Ardunio board, we wrote a C program that can read the vibration sensor value. To test the sensors and the board, first use the Serial Monitor on the Ardunio application to see the values. We construct the Ardunio board with the sensors as shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3 below.  

   Figure 2: Layout of vibration sensor and the board

    Figure 3: Layout of bluetooth sensor and the board

Then we use MIT App Inventor to create a user interface to display the values of the vibration sensor that are transmitted from the Bluetooth. At last, we modify the user interface for user to setup his/her emergency contact setting and connect the Bluetooth device to activate the user application as shown in the Figure 4 below.

Figure 4: User Interface of the Safety Guard Companion App

Team Organization

Professor Glenn Healey — Faculty advisor, who is in the EECS department. Professor Healey is interested in machine learning and computer graphic.

Elisa Huang — Team captain. Computer Engineering student, who implemented sensors on the Arduino board and user software application. 

Mu Aung — Electrical Engineering student, who tested the sensors and helped constructing the circuit with sensors.

Chris Tran — Electrical Engineering student, who constructed the circuit with the sensors and the Arduino board and connect the network between the hardware and software.