The competition was tough, but one project in our Connected Home contest rose to the top: Erin Robotgrrl’s “nutrition monitor for the elderly.” A panel of six MAKE editors evaluated a deep field of entrants and chose Robotgrrl’s entry based on originality, innovation, and documentation. Here’s how she described the project:
The nutrition monitor for the elderly calculates a malnutrition score based off of body mass index and the daily food intake. The score is then uploaded to a remote dashboard that a guardian can view, and be alerted if it exceeds a threshold.
Daily food intake is measured by the change of the weight from the food, as detected by DIY force sensitive resistors. The Arduino is using the NutriModule library I made. For each food module attached, it runs a state machine where the sensor data is filtered, data is updated, and the current state monitored to detect and changes in weight or button presses. An application is used as a gateway to the ‘Internet of Things’, for the Arduino to upload the data. This application, written in Processing, also calculates the malnutrition score, and a daily portion amount remaining. This data is then pushed to ThingSpeak. If the malnutrition score exceeds a certain threshold, then an alert is sent to the guardian via Twitter. A remote dashboard webpage displays dynamically updating graphs of the data on ThingSpeak. Here, a guardian can monitor the page periodically to see the changes in the food intake.
And here is the video she submitted with her entry: http://youtu.be/24b3xc1JGs4 Robotgrrl will receive a $500 voucher from the Maker Shed and we’ll be featuring her project in the near future. Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry. We got some really good ones that we will be sharing here in the weeks to come.
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