Unfulfilled Projects

I’ve got a few projects I’ve been trying to build for years now. I’ve never had enough time to really dig in to the meat of them, but now that I’ve finally finished my capstone I’ll be able to move some of these forward.

I’ll focus on the biggest, simplest one first: There’s no good solution out there for managing Direct Support Workers (DSWs). In Oregon, at least, home healthcare workers can be contracted through a few different agencies to support those with medical needs in their own homes. While the system *should* work, in practice we’ve found staff to be unreliable and coverage to be spotty. A relative of mine was left for more than 18 hours sitting in her wheelchair in her kitchen after a one staff neglected to plug her phone in to charge, and a second failed to arrive for shift.

Leaving aside the incident, it got me thinking. A staff “Dead-Man’s Switch” should not be terribly difficult to develop. Cheap, well-supported processors like Arduino-compatible ESP8266s give a fantastic platform for an IOT device. I’d like to combine that with an MQTT message queue, and a simple back end. The back end should scrape a google calendar, check when staff shifts start, and send out SMS or push notifications to a defined emergency contact list if the button isn’t hit within a specified time period. There’s a few other functions I’d like to add, but that’s the core of it.

Call this project kick-off: I’m going to try to build this over the next month or two.