Bath university students develop app to help women's safety

Smartwatch app Epowar sends out an alert when it senses distress

The app for smartwatches is designed to sense distress
Author: James DiamondPublished 22nd Nov 2021

Two students from the University of Bath are developing an app to improve women's safety.

The idea is Epowar, a smartwatch app, will monitor the wearers heart rate and body motion to sense distress and then automatically send out an emergency alert.

Trials of the technology have just started, with its creators saying it eliminates the major issue with rape alarms and other safety products: that they need to be physically activated, which is often not an option in the event of an attack.

WATCH: Founders E-J Roodt and Maks Rahman talk about Epowar

Inspiration for the app came to E-J Roodt, a BSc Business student at the University’s School of Management, while jogging in a badly lit park and worrying about the risk of an attack.

Roodt, a keen smartwatch user, was aware of the advancements in wearable technology and how it was being used to detect heart attacks - saving real lives.

She wondered if those concepts could be applied to women’s safety and took her ideas to Maks Rahman, an engineering student who had just returned from a year at Fraunhofer IPA, a medical research organisation.

Together, they co-founded Epowar.

“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 (artificial intelligence)," Roodt said.

"We have now reached the development stage where in-field testing can start and are confident we are close to creating a finished product."

In the event of an attack, the smartwatch app senses distress and sends an alert to the wearer’s contacts, but that is not all.

It also sets off a loud alarm and records evidence that is immediately stored in a cloud system.

During the trial several volunteers will simulate physical attacks to fine-tune the software.

In a statement the University of Bath says the AI is smart enough to distinguish between physical or psychological stress.

"The AI-powered system was built on extensive research into detectable responses to physical distress and an analysis of thousands of samples of physiological and motion data," it reads.

"It occurred to us that a smartwatch with this app may be a way to alert others if a woman is restrained or struggling," Roodt said.

"The key is that it would all happen automatically and an assailant would have little or no time to prevent this – which is not always possible with conventional panic buttons, rape alarms or your mobile phone."

In a bid to avoid security issues, users of the app will be able to chose whether to run it permanently or just switch it on for specific journeys, while all data collected would be anonymised.

“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," Roodt said.

"We hope people will recognise the ability to automatically alert contacts as a game-changer in a world where such software seems increasingly necessary."

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