How DevOps is helping one company ensure an active older population can remain independent
SOFIHUB home is designed to support older people who wish to live as independently as possible. However, its sensor-based system needed an upgrade to improve the user experience.
The SOFIHUB technology connects wirelessly to sensors placed around the home and learns the individual’s habits. When it detects deviation from the user’s routine or other issues, it asks if they are OK. Unless the answer is affirmative, it automatically contacts a nominated carer.
However, the existing products were created with a risk-aversion mindset and built to standards rather than user requirements, which sometimes impacted the user experience. “The market required a change,” said SOFIHUB CTO Ian Aitken.
For example, personal alarm pendants intended to detect falls generated four false alarms for every real fall they detected. A common cause of false alarms was the pendant accidentally hitting a piece of furniture.
In any case, only 4% to 12% of pendant owners actually used their devices, he said, mostly because they forgot to put them on after showering or dressing in the morning. Plus, many often regard pendants negatively, referring to them as “cowbells.”
So SOFIHUB changed its approach, placing movement sensors around the home to detect when the person moves from one room to another.
The sensors communicate via Z-Wave with the Raspberry Pi-based SOFIHUB home, which processes the data. The Raspberry Pi is capable, stable and cheap, said Aiken. But the finished product required additional custom electronics to provide power management and other functionality. The designers also added a microcontroller that monitors the Raspberry Pi and restarts it if necessary.
Caregivers receive alerts if the person is late to bed, late to rise or spends longer than usual in the bathroom, or if there is a lack of movement for longer than usual. Machine learning algorithms developed in conjunction with Monash University detect these patterns.
SOFIHUB is also able to deliver reminders such as those for appointments and birthdays or, working with a medicine cabinet sensor, when it’s time to take medications.
The optional SOFIHUB beacon is a panic alarm that can also generate alerts when it detects the user has left a geofenced area or has fallen. Since the hardware is basically a mobile phone without a dial pad, caregivers can call it to converse with the user.
Where the use of conventional pendants was about 10%, the use of the SOFIHUB beacon is around 60%, partly because the system reminds people to keep the beacon charged and take it with them. For example, it suggests they pick up the beacon from the charger once it has reached 80%.
The system transfers data collected by the SOFIHUB home to cloud-based infrastructure for longitudinal analysis and other purposes.
The company developed and must maintain several layers of software: code for the main board and the microcontroller within SOFIHUB home, code for managing Wi-Fi and cellular communications, and the code that runs in the cloud. SOFIHUB uses containers and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) rather than platform as a service (PaaS), so it can easily move from AWS to another host if necessary.
“We’re reasonably sophisticated,” said Aitken. For example, the company created a separate domain for a new corporate customer in around a day and a half, thanks to the level of automation within its DevOps processes.
The SOFIHUB service is also available through alarm center companies to ensure someone is always available to react in emergencies. Onboarding a new alarm monitoring company is usually a quick process, even if custom features are required. Sometimes implementing old protocols still used by some alarm centers takes longer.
“We are a highly skilled team of developers” and database experts, said Aitken. This “small, very agile team” works without dedicated operations staff, although two people specialize in building and maintaining implementation scripts.
The team has adopted widely used tools (eg, Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub and CircleCI), and a well-developed release mechanism sees code start in a developer’s instance before moving into the AWS environment for additional testing.
From there, it progresses to the user acceptance testing environment to deal with any UI and browser-specific issues. After that, the code goes into production.
SOFIHUB does not do automated testing. Aitken said that’s because it actually slows development to an unacceptable degree, roughly doubling development time due to the effort needed to write the tests.
New releases occur every Wednesday with two fortnightly development cycles running side by side. Aitken said he expects the pace will slow as the product becomes mature and foresees monthly releases starting sometime in 2021.
Embrace revealed today it is adding support for open source OpenTelemetry agent software to its software development kits (SDKs) that…
The data used to train AI models needs to reflect the production environments where applications are deployed.
Looking for a DevOps job? Look at these openings at NBC Universal, BAE, UBS, and other companies with three-letter abbreviations.
Tricentis is adding AI assistants to make it simpler for DevOps teams to create tests.
Redis is taking it in the chops, as both maintainers and customers move to the Valkey Redis fork.