Cane Walker Project Research

By: Diana Garcia

5/22/19

Abstract: An estimated of 6 in 10 people

are at risk of wandering due to confusion

and disorientation because of early

Alzheimer’s. Wandering for older adults

is really dangerous and hard to detect

those who have it especially when they are

active. It is easy for them to become

confused and lost which can lead to

dangerous consequences such as injuries

or death from harsh weather conditions

that they may not be aware of. The reason

why I wanted my project to take

wandering Alzheimer’s into consideration

is because my Grandpa has it and I

wanted to create a project that would

help him as well as others who are

affected by this behavior.

I. Introduction

People who have a problem with memory

loss are at risk for wandering even if they

are the early stages of dementia. They can

become confused and disoriented for some

period in time. One of the main symptoms

my Grandpa suffered from was forgetting

how to get back home after leaving my

uncle's house to go on one of his daily

walks. He had been very familiar with the

area before until this day he forgot how to.

Luckily he remembered a phone number

without realizing it was my uncles and the

local store helped, by contacting him and

telling him the situation that had happened.

This leads to my project.

A. Electron Particle Board

The Electron is a small kit that will create a

3G cellular connection amongst other

products that you may use in your projects.

The specifications of the Electron is that it

has 36 pins with 28 being GPIO (D0 -D13,

A0-A13), a transmitter/receiver, 2 grounds,

Vin, Vbattery,WKP, 3V3, and a RST. It is a

small board with dimensions of 2.0”x

0.8”x0.3”. It has a cellular radio with mine

being a 3G for America and Australia. The

main processor consists of an STM32F205

ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller and a

1MB Flash with 128K RAM. I will be using

the Device Cloud which includes 3MB of

cellular data per month.

The Device Cloud allows us to manage our

device, use over the air firmware, manage

connectivity, develop tools, and use

integrations.

II. Project

The goal of my project was to use an

Electron Particle board and connect it to a

cane or walker depending on what the user

prefers. The board would be able to obtain

the location of the user as well as monitoring

the person's blood pressure and heart rate.

The goal was to collect data such as, the

person's blood pressure in beats per minute,

and collect the coordinates of the person's

location. Once the data has been collected

the main focus was to send this data

collected and send it to a loved ones phone

to let them know of their whereabouts and

health without letting the user feel like they

can not continue on with their routine. The

devices I was currently using for my project

was the Electron Particle Board, a pulse

sensor, and an arduino board. In this paper I

will talk about the data that I have collected

and what I would do differently in order to

have a better outcome.

III. Experiment

A. GPS Locator

I began my experiment my first registering

my Electron Particle board. The reason why

I chose this particular board was because it

would allow me to create a 3G

cellular-connection between the phone and

the board itself. This board also comes with

a particle SIM card that will provide a

service in worldwide countries. The Electron

Particle board will be able to connect with

the device cloud which is a tool that will

help us to build, connect, and manage our

device through code. Once the device was

installed and updated I continued to do some

more research on the board to get a better

understanding of what I was working with.

With the Electron Particle board, the gps

locator would be set up along with sending

SMS messaging to the phone. I began by

initializing the GPS locator using google

maps that was associated with Particle.

The above code calls our google maps to be

able to track the location of the Particle

board. The Serial.begin(9600) is the 9600

bits per second which is set in default for the

Electron Particle board.

This next line of code allows the location to

be returned to be handled by the

locationCallback() by passing it through. It

will publish the location to the Cloud every

30 seconds. The locationCallback() in the

next line will handle the location data that is

being returned for the device by passing

three different arguments that we see above

as latitude, longitude, and the accuracy of

the location.

We create a loop in order to get updated

results on the locator every 30 seconds.

When we compile the code and run it our

next step is to create an integration through

the console.particle.io by clicking the

integration tab. Once it is clicked we will be

given four options. The one I chose is

Google maps since we want our gps locator

to work. Once we choose Google Maps we

need to retrieve an API key through Google

Maps JavaScript that we can add to our

Electron Particle board. The API key is used

for us to track our API requests that is

associated with this project which in our

case is locating the location. Once we type

in our API key, I just needed to choose the

device I wanted to run and shown below.

Once we save our Integration, we run the

code with the chosen integration being

applied and we get the following output.

Our location came out in the form of

coordinates as shown below.

If I type the coordinates in Google Maps, I

get this location shown below

Which is the location of where I live Shasta

Glen Apartments.

The image below is how the board is setup

in order to obtain the location:

We have our antenna connected to our

Electron board and instead of using a USB

connected to a laptop as battery source, I

used the battery connected directly to the

board.

B. SMS Messaging

My next step was to enable texting messages

that will send the data collected to a reliable

person who will be taking care of the

person. In order to do this, I first had to

create a twilio account in which this account

allows me to send messages and make calls

to verified numbers by providing me with a

trial number, and account SID, and an auth

token. We need these three items in order to

receive messages through the Electron

Particle board. In order to test it out, I used

the following code.

The first line of code is the message we will

receive on our phone when we run and

compile our code. The void setup() is where

it all happens. Particle.publish() will publish

the event that we want through our Particle

Device Cloud. It will forward to the

registered messenger. This feature allows

the device to generate the event based on our

condition. In our case we want to send a

message from the Electron Particle board to

the phone. The structure of Particle.publish()

is Particle.publish(string eventName, string

data, publish flags). The string eventName is

the name of our integration. To get a better

picture we will look at the image below.

Along with the URL we use to connect to

twilio. Now the trial number we get from

Twilio will be the one we register our

Electron Particle. We must go to advanced

settings and add not just the trial number but

the number we want to receive messages

from. It will look like the following where

“To” is my phone number and “From” is the

Twilio trial number. The image below

shows our username which is our given SID

number and our password being our auth

token. This directly connects our Twilio

phone number connected to the Electron

Particle board and allows us to send

messages from Twilio to the phone. When

we run and compile the code we get the

following output in the console.

It lets us know that that the compilation was

a success and the message has been sent in

the following form of a text message. It lets

us know that our Twilio account sent the

message. The text message says “Cane

Walker Support Message”. I used this to test

the project name on the phone.

C. Pulse Sensor

Our next step is to use the pulse sensor in

order to detect the heart-rate for the Arduino

My goal was to use the Electron Particle

board to get the heart-rate but due to

technical difficulties I moved onto the

Arduino board. The Pulse sensor is an

integrated optical amplifying circuit and

eliminates noise through the circuit sensor.

We will connect the pulse sensor directly to

the Arduino board as shown below:

We have the brown wire connected to

ground, black wire connected to 5V, and the

white wire connected to A0 which is our

sensor.

When we run the following code, we get the

following output in values of beats per

minute. I collected the data from beats per

minute and plugged into excel and got the

following output.

# BPM

1 238

2 194

3 181

4 143

5 149

6 155

7 162

8 170

9 178

10 187

11 198

12 209

13 222

14 236

15 236

16 237

17 237

18 237

19 237

20 237

21 237

22 237

23 237

24 238

25 238

26 238

I connected the pulse sensor to my wrist in

order to collect the data above. I collected

238 points but only showed a little bit

above. When I plugged the values in excel, I

got the following graph.

Our x-axis is the # of values that we

collected and the y-axis is the number of

beats per minute. If I use the Arduino Plotter

I get the following output:

IV. What Did Not Work

I was able to get each one of my main parts

to work individually, but my biggest

challenge was getting them to work all

together as one. I did my best to first copy

the code I previously had for Google maps

and continue to add onto to it with the

second piece of code being retrieving the

coordinates and sending a text message

using my Twilio account. I was able to get

the code to work and compile but when I

created the integration, I was getting errors.

I was reading an article that had said that

using the Particle AssetTracker was better

than using the Electron Particle board when

using Google Maps. It would be able to

directly send messages directly to your

phone. It was something that I considered

switching the board but due to my financial

situation, I was not able to. I had a goal of

having the Electron Particle coordinates and

having them being opened directly onto

Google Maps but I was having trouble

having it open up so I kept it by just using

the coordinates.

V. Conclusion

Even though I had many complications and

it was a challenge, I did get a lot out of it. As

I still continued to do more research to get

out of it, I found ways in which I can

improve to one day make this project work.

I plan to continue working on this project

over the summer and hope that many people

will be able to use it one day and feel great

about it.

Sources

● https://docs.particle.io/tutorials/int

egrations/google-maps/

● https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/t

utorials/how-to-send-sms-messages

-particle-electron

● https://docs.particle.io/datasheets/c

ellular/electron-datasheet/

● https://www.sparkfun.com/produc

ts/11574