An interdisciplinary team of second-year BTech students of IIT Kharagpur has developed an AI mobile app that can become a caregiver for India’s 112 million elderly people. Since, India’s huge elderly population, geriatric care is fast emerging as a major worry for India.

IIT students named Aniruddha Chattopadhyay, Aadi Swadipto Mondal, Partha Sarathi Roy, and Kanishka Haldar have invested in preparing the app. They strongly feel that AI will improve and impact everyone’s life.

Apart from a range of health problems, the elderlies face loneliness, abuse, or plain neglect. Even if the caregiver is willing, at times they find it inordinately difficult to reach out to the aged at the right time. India’s huge elderly population is becoming a major concern but with such an innovation a solution might come up.

The android-based CARE4U app recently bagged the first runners-up position for the IIT Kharagpur team at a nationwide hackathon called ‘vesAIthon’19’ sponsored by Capgemini and Leading India. CARE4U app can also work without the internet.

The IIT Kharagpur students built two interconnected android smartphone apps under the name ‘CARE4U’ that connects the caregiver to the elderly.

One of these apps can be installed on the phone of the elderly while the other is to be installed on the smartphone of the caregiver.

The best part about the app is that except for the chatbot, no cloud service is needed. It can function without internet connection too and can-do fall detection, emotion detection also.

The ‘CARE4U’ mobile app can also do a plethora of day-to-day life activities like make a call, send a text, book a cab and so on. It has a record of medical histories, allergy account, an SOS button, real-time location tracking and so on.

It also has a Medicine Reminder’ feature to remind both the elderly as well as the caregiver to take medicine. To make a list of the medicine, one has to take a photo of the medicine. The image-to-text recognition algorithm of CARE4U automatically detects the name of the medicine and adds it to the list. The user then just needs to set the time at which the medicine has to be consumed.

The fall detection algorithm installed in the app on the phone of the elderly can detect whether the elderly has fallen. If there is a fall, it automatically calls the caregiver and emergency services with the location of the elderly person.

CARE4U can also detect emotion. Whenever the elderly opens the app, the phone takes his picture and a mood index is calculated. It detects the mood of the person and automatically updates the caregiver.

The caregiver can check what mood the senior citizen has been throughout the day and perhaps talk about it.

To make this feature more effective the team has developed a cognitive intelligent chatbot for the elderly person to engage with.

The creators of this app are hopeful that they will be able to reach out to our elderly population and positively impact their lives.