_{^{HiYa- How's your auntie}}

Bilal Ahmad (Doctoral Researcher at UL) competed in the first IBM Watson IoT Hackathon held in Portershed, Galway. His research area is Connected Smart Ageing and he used this in helping to find a design solution for the competition. Current research states social isolation and loneliness as the most critical problems in the lives of elderly which can eventually lead to health problems such as dementia and cardiovascular diseases. It has also been found that disengagement from society and other community level activities is as bad as 15 cigarettes a day.

In order to provide a solution to this problem Bilal along with a team of five others helped design an IoT app to overcome the problem of social isolation in older adults. The idea was to develop a technology that would be accessible and easy to use especially for the elderly. The technologies used are, VT Sigfox sensor, IBM Bluemix and Node-Red and CISCO..

So, the story starts with Eileen who is in her late 70’s and she is wearing a band that has a sensor deployed in it. This sensor is continuously reading the number of steps she takes or her movements and then sending these details to IBM Bluemix platform. She can also pick up her phone and just send a voice message e.g. ‘hi, I am feeling very sad and lonely’. A third party app was used to convert the speech of this message to voice and then send Bluemix. After that Node-Red and sentiment analysis was used to analyze the Eileen’s current mood and physical condition. On the basis of that a notification could be sent to her family member or friend about her and then they could use a web-interface to virtually visit her.

A total of 12 teams participated in the event and awards were given for ,best overall hack, best citizen scientist IoT project/community hack and Edge Hack. Bilal and his team won the Edge Hack prize.