Krupali Patel
SURAKSHA
Wearable technology for women's safety
Goal : Easy to carry and unnoticeable self defense weapon for women in the times of emergencies
Project type: Group
My role: UX researcher, UI designer, Concept development
Brief: Women's safety is a very important issue due to rising crimes against women these days. Existing solutions found to be failure due to different reasons. To resolve this issue we propose a system to help women if she is walking alone or in dark area. This system includes wearable device. This system can be turned on by a woman in case she thinks she is in trouble. The system consists of dual features-1) GSM module- To inform police/family when in trouble 2) Buzzer- To attract people’s attention .
Ideation
We started with analyzing past and present self defense weapons used by women and why these weapons are failing to help women.
We found out why majority of these weapons are failing to help women. So according to analysis we realized that new solution should be -
Easy to carry
Unnoticeable
and
To fill the existing gap and by keeping in mind above features we came up with an idea of wearable device called SURAKSHA which women can wear anywhere on their body. We then ideate how SURAKSHA will work and how it will satisfied the above requirements.
Prototype
Functional Prototype
Working of circuits
The circuit consisted of wired piezoelectric pressure sensor, Piezo buzzer, GSM module and Arduino UNO board. When the person taps on the clothes 4 times(Why 4 times?- To avoid accidental touch) an SOS message is sent to the nearest police station and the family members. We have kept the tap count to 4 to avoid accidental taps. We started by connecting each component to Arduino and writing the code for it. Then we connected them all-together and wrote a complete code. We also tried connecting GPS module with the above circuit but we failed to implement it as the GPS module does not work in closed space as it has to connect to satellites. And the number of satellites were showing as 0 when the code was run.
Next steps
As of now we have only used GSM to send text message but our next step is to connect GPS module with GSM module so that women can send current location and other important information to the police. So there will be two different app interfaces for two different users. We named this app SURAKSHA.
There will be two app-
1) For women
2) For police
Screens
We thought of integrating this Suraksha in the already existing government app UMANG. So that user can have all in one facility and they don't have to install additional app.
Women can save their information like emergency mobile number, Adhar card number through this App.
Whenever women tap on the device 4 times, the system will send the live location and other related information to the nearby police station and also one of the family members so that they will be notify and can save her.
App-1: User 1 (Women)
App-2: User 2 (Police)