ValuLarm - iOS App and Device
Project Definition, Audience and Scope:
In light of modern consumerism, we're consistently becoming overwhelmed by the increase of new material possessions and lose track of old valuable possessions. For parents with young children, keeping track of everything from your wallet to your child is a stressful and frustrating endeavor. Current valuable trackers on the market fail to be accurate, and can only provide the approximate geographic position of your valuables. We wanted to create a new tracker that can locate your personal things but also keep an eye on your children in an accurate, convenient matter.
Requirements:
- Notify the user if a valuable has left a maximum periferal.
- Locate the valuable in the periferal.
- Set of an audible alarm that the valuable has left periferal.
- Light, compact and easy to carry under a size of a credit card.
- Durable enough to drop from 1.5 meters.
- Have a sleek and discreet design.
- Have a connected interface app on an iPhone 8.
Product:
We created a sleek, credit card sized device that was able to alert the user if their item has left a selected periferal of 5m, 10m, 25m, and 50 meters using RSSI Bluetooth data and an ACXL attachment. The geolocator attachment for an Adafruit microprocessor allowed us to provide location data for the item to the application. The App was created in Swift for iOS development and had the ability to log in and register your device personally. From this app, users can toggle between different periferal distances and locate their object with ease at the touch of a button.
Evaluation:
From our research, we tailored specifications with measurable numerics to evaluate our success. In our tests, we saw that users were able to set periferals easily using our UI and that the device would successfully notify the user if their item left the periferal and location data was shown on the interface. The device was able to withstand drops of up to 1.5m and had a durable shell to protect the delicate PCB inside. From our data collection, about 65 out of 70 users said that they liked the device and UI, and would use it in their daily life. With a location and periferal accuracy rate of about 80%, the device and iOS was recognized as a formidable and promising product.
Improvements:
There is always room for improvement with our device and UI. In the future, we would like to utilize smaller sized adafruit device chips to create an even smaller device, and add a more robust algorithm to ensure better accuracy around corners and different floors (as a downside to bluetooth tech). With the UI, we would like to implement a sleeker design and possibly try shifting the design to a webapp in JS to expand to Web APIs (for example, Mozilla's Geolocation API) for better accuracy in marking our target's location.