Project 96: SmartCare higher level of personal safety and care – new technology for you and your family!

Motivation and Background
In Finland alone there is ever so growing number of senior citizens. Today’s wireless technology is not that well utilized with the care givers and the senior citizens though. In this segment there is great opportunities for creating services that help the seniors to stay in their own homes and familiar surroundings a bit longer than before. These applications help seniors in their everyday activities and make sure that help is available easily anytime and anywhere.
This project concentrates on the Turva –safety service consisting of a GSM based safety phone with integrated GPS positioning system that connects to a web application. This application helps care givers/relatives to easily locate safety phone users in need for help. In this project it is quite important to keep in mind the end customers who are care giving workers, relatives and seniors – the application should be really easy to use.

Project goals
- State of the art software for GPS tracking in care giving environment.
- Easy to use interface for elderly people and other users with limited computer skills

Desired student skills/competencies/team size
4-6 persons in the team. Cooperation between team members is a must, but of course everybody has their own responsibilities and subtasks to master.
- Software development for server side (preferably j2ee, but other languages are possible too.) 1-2 persons
- Web based GUI design and development with excellent usability(Google maps, Ajax etc.) 1-2 persons
- Graphical design 1 person
- Java based GPS tracking application for Nokia mobile phones (s60, j2me). 1 person
 
Development environment
The server is a Linux-based server running Jboss + Tomcat, Mysql/PostgreSQL, Apache etc. Server can be a Windows  server if this is well reasoned. Client side must be usable with different web browsers running on different platforms. In software development localization must be taken into account at first there is need for Swedish and Finnish translations. Basic software can  be created and documented in English or Finnish. Currently we are using GeoSkeeper safety phone for getting user GPS-position. API of the phone is provided for the development team.
 
Contact information
Jouni Mäkipää, jouni.makipaa (at) ecotec.fi
Antti Häikiö, Antti.Haikio (at) ecotec.fi
Graziella Vartola, Graziella.Vartola (at) ecotec.fi

Please also inform Demola Staff when you contact the company contact person.