Guardian — Diane Chiang

I don’t feel safe alone.

The Challenge

As we go about our day, we often encounter stressful or sketchy situations. Whether it’s walking home alone, hit-and-run incidents, or even unpredictable disasters, easy access to friends, family, and emergency service providers keeps us all safer. If only they can all be on speed dial…

Solution

Guardian is a personal emergency broadcast app that sends alerts and live video to close friends, family, and emergency responders when help is needed.

Sponsor
Amazon Web Services

Role
UX/UI Design

Platform
Mobile App

Industry
Security

In many difficult situations, we can't anticipate what will happen next. Sometimes we just need reassurance from loved ones.

With the Guardian app, friends & family become an extra pair of eyes and ears in real time.

How Guardian Works

Enable your camera.

Allowing your camera access allows the app to use features such as live-streaming, recordings, image analysis, and audio recognition.

Receive auto alerts.

When Guardian detects high-stress situations, the app sends automatic push alerts to prompt action.

Ask for help.

With the push of a button, Guardian sends your emergency contacts a text of your location and a link to your livestream video.

View history of incidents.

You’re able to view a history of recent incidents as well as video recordings and details of those incidents.

Livestream in real-time.

Friends and family can watch your video livestream in real time and give help and support.

A Machine Learning App

Guardian draws from different machine learning capabilities to provide enhanced features. Image recognition and sentiment analysis identify positive, negative, and neutral emotions of people captured by the camera. From there, the app is able to automatically determine whether to push an alert for action.

The Tech Stack

Amazon Rekognition

A deep learning technology that visually analyzes static images and video, Amazon Rekog identifies objects (including people) and applies relevant labels depending on specific business needs.

Amazon Polly

Beyond typical speech recognition and text transcription, Amazon Polly is a platform that converts text to lifelike speech. With a machine learning approach, Amazon Polly is able to build apps that talk.

Agora.io

Agora is a voice and video conferencing live-stream service. In addition, it offers recording and real-time messaging across many platforms, from web to mobile applications.

Twilio

Twilio is a one-step platform that connects people through multiple methods: text messages, emails, phone calls, and video. Communication is streamlined and can be delivered in one app.

Sample Youtube clips used in project for demonstration purposes only.

Final Thoughts

We all need support systems to give us advice, support, and a second opinion. Sometimes we need to be able to quickly get all of these from our loved ones. Guardian is an app that makes it easy to do so.

What do we need next to make this happen?

Many features of Guardian needs stress testing for validation, especially the machine learning aspects. As this system works on machine learning principles, the more “learning” the app is able to do, the more complete the app’s predictions will be.

What have we not considered?

As this app needs GPS coordinate data in order to send location to loved ones, users may be concerned about privacy rights. In order for the app to be widely accepted, we need to access how to deal with the users’ private data.