Trials begin of revolutionary women's smartwatch safety app

Trials statesman this week successful Bath of a revolutionary caller smartwatch app that monitors a wearer's bosom complaint and assemblage question to consciousness distress, automatically sending an exigency alert.

The Epowar app, aimed chiefly astatine women's safety, eliminates the large contented with rape alarms and different accepted information products: they request to beryllium physically activated, which is often not an enactment successful the lawsuit of an attack.

The innovative smartwatch app solves this problem, utilizing AI to instantly admit distress successful a user's activity—responding instantly if a idiosyncratic is attacked erstwhile walking oregon moving alone.

Inspiration for the app came to E-J Roodt, a BSc Business pupil astatine the University's School of Management, portion jogging successful a severely lit parkland and worrying astir the hazard of an attack.

Roodt, a keen smartwatch user, was alert of the advancements successful wearable exertion and however it was being utilized to observe bosom attacks—saving existent lives. She wondered if those concepts could beryllium applied to women's information and took her ideas to Maks Rahman, an engineering student who had conscionable returned from a twelvemonth astatine Fraunhofer IPA, a aesculapian probe organization. Together, they co-founded Epowar.

"After months of probe and experiment, we were fascinated to find that people's responses to distress were remarkably accordant and that this could beryllium reliably captured and interpreted utilizing AI. We person present reached the improvement signifier wherever in-field testing tin commencement and are assured we are adjacent to creating a finished product," Roodt said.

In the lawsuit of an attack, the smartwatch app senses distress, sends an alert to the wearer's contacts, sets disconnected a large alarm, and records grounds that volition beryllium stored instantly successful a unreality system. The Epowar squad person assembled a fig of volunteers who, among different exercises, volition simulate carnal onslaught to fine-tune the software.

The AI-powered strategy was built connected extended probe into detectable responses to carnal distress and an investigation of thousands of samples of physiological and question data. The AI models tin separate betwixt carnal and intelligence stress.

"It occurred to america that a smartwatch with this app whitethorn beryllium a mode to alert others if a pistillate is restrained oregon struggling. The cardinal is that it would each hap automatically and an assailant would person small oregon nary clip to forestall this—which is not ever imaginable with accepted panic buttons, rape alarms oregon your mobile phone," Roodt said.

Roodt said she was keen to debar the privateness issues that person clouded different information apps, which whitethorn see tracking the user. Epowar's bundle does not way oregon place the wearer, up to the constituent wherever an alert is issued. A idiosyncratic could take to tally the app permanently oregon power it connected for circumstantial journeys wherever he/she felt determination was imaginable risk. The information collected would beryllium utilized to fine-tune the app but would beryllium anonymised, she said.

"We are keen to find ways to marque this arsenic affordable and accessible to arsenic galore women arsenic imaginable and could envisage a strategy wherever organizations, specified arsenic schools oregon universities, marque disposable specified bundle to groups for example. We anticipation radical volition admit the quality to automatically alert contacts arsenic a game-changer successful a satellite wherever specified bundle seems progressively necessary," she said.

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