Every conventional products which are aimed at women’s safety have one big problem – they have to be physically activated. That’s why in some situations they cannot be used. But E-J a student from University’s School of Management, while jogging in badly lit park came up with a brilliant idea that will solve this problem. She thought that if with development of technology smartwatches can easily detect heart diseases they could be also used as women’s safety product. She told about this idea to her friend and they together Co-Founded Epowar.
Epowar is a smartwatch app that by using AI can recognise distress in a user’s activity. Application in the event of attack sends an alert to the wearers contacts, sets off a loud alarm, records evidence and stores it immediately in a cloud system.
“After months of research and experiment, we were fascinated to find that people’s responses to distress were remarkably consistent and that this could be reliably captured and interpreted using AI. We have now reached the development stage where in-field testing can start and are confident we are close to creating a finished product,” E-J said.
The AI-powered system was built based on analysis of thousands of samples of physiological and motion data. This system is able to distinguish between physical and psychological stress.
Users of Epowar don’t have to worry about privacy issues wearing their smartwatches. Epowar’s software does not track or identify the wearer, up to the point where an alert is issued. A user can take on application during specific journeys or make it work all the time.
“We are keen to find ways to make this as affordable and accessible to as many women as possible and could envisage a system where organisations, such as schools or universities, make available such software to groups for example. We hope people will recognise the ability to automatically alert contacts as a game-changer in a world where such software seems increasingly necessary,” E-J said.
Resources:
https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-trials-begin-womens-smartwatch-safety-app
This is train of thought is actually genius. Using data to predict events that look likely to occur is almost like predicting the future and so many women would like to know if they are getting in danger in the near future. With this , there is the potential for accident prevention like no other.
That’s very interesting. What came to my mind after reading your article, is the question of the origin of the data used to train the AI models. I checked their website, but they don’t say much more either, apart from “The Epowar team have assembled a number of volunteers who, among other exercises, will simulate a physical attack to fine-tune the software.” I think Epower is a great idea, but I worry about the accuracy because it’s hard for me to process, that “people’s responses to distress were remarkably consistent”, and that simulated excercises could provide reliable data of the actual physiological reaction. Obviously, I might be missing something, so I wish the team shared more about their sources.