Abstract:

    This project explores how we can find someone who might be able to help our loved ones when they are in need. It also looks at how we can successfully communicate with these intermediate parties in a way that does not interfere with their privacy or burden them with social pressure.

    The goal of the system is to provide a mechanism to cultivate social activity by logging a user’s communications, locations (via GPS) and nearby phones (via Bluetooth) scanning. In addition, it provides a means to communicate with a third party who is physically close to our distant family members, while minimizing the exposure of the third party’s privacy.  The system also enables us to receive confirmation of whether or not someone is available to help our distant loved ones at their physical location.  If the first person who is contacted is not available, we will then need to try to contact each person suggested by the system (in turn) else until we eventually find someone who is available and willing to help.

Introduction:

Problem: Increasing the overall security of an individual requires not only monitoring but also managing potentially risky situations. When a risky situation is detected, it is reasonable to think about how to solve it. When we think about providing help to our dependents, one way to provide help is to go to their physical location. However, when our dependents are located too far away for us to get to them in a reasonable amount of time, another solution is to find someone in close proximity to them who can provide assistance. This is not only helpful to our dependents, but it also provides a way to further assess the seriousness of the situation by adding an alternative avenue of communication.  This could be especially useful if our dependents’ communication channel is temporally unavailable.

We are living in a society where an individual might have multiple relationships with multiple social groups.  This makes the task of finding someone to help our dependents difficult, because the most appropriate person to provide help may not be in a social group for which we might have contact information. When our dependents are not living in the same town but we still need to take care of them remotely, it becomes harder to find someone with access to our dependents’ social contacts.

In addition, personal relationships are often regarded as private; thus, when we try to access the contact information of someone with whom we don’t have a direct relationship, we are attempting to find a communication channel which has not been explicitly allowed previously. Thus, in designing a system for finding someone who can help our remote dependents, we need to find a way to protect the privacy of both our dependents and their peers. Additionally, we need to think about how we might find a contact person in close physical proximity to our dependents, and how to communicate with them successfully.

Solution and approach: “Who is around you” tackles the discovery of our loved one’s social peers who can potentially provide help in an emergency (or urgent needs), and help a remote caregiver to assess an unusual situation. Because the nature of social relationships is dynamic and changes over time, it is hard to find contact information for our dependents’ peers. By investigating the communication frequency between users and each of their peers via phone logs, and examining the time that users spend in close proximity to each of their peers, the system determines who the best possible individuals are to call and ask for help. In order to accomplish this, the system keeps track of communication logs, Bluetooth MAC Address (BTID) logs, and phones’ location logs. Periodically-scanned BTIDs are used to examine the proximity of co-located peers. Since a GPS-enabled phone can locate its position through book-marking certain locations, e.g. “at home”, the system can further search for a person who actually visited the user’s home, by examining the events in Bluetooth logs and location logs. These logs are only kept in an individual user’s phone and other phones cannot directly access this information. Finally, the process of finding a possible remote contact person is determined inside the phone which is running the application, but the name and the contact information are completely hidden from other phones, which are requesting contacts, for the sake of protecting the privacy of everyone involved.