Title: 1 – How we came up with the idea Photos: system_architecture.png

At Zotduino @ embedded world North America, we chose the Sensing Challenge (sponsored by Arduino, Qualcomm, Quilter, ASUS). The challenge described an elderly relative who lives alone and a family that wants peace of mind, without a camera in the room and without their audio being sent anywhere.

That framing shaped our goal: a device that listens for emergencies instead of watching for them. We brainstormed sounds that would signal a real emergency for an elderly person living alone, including falling, glass breaking, fire alarms, and cries for help or pain.

We then made three design decisions:

• Keep it private. Classification runs on the Arduino Uno Q, so no audio leaves the room and no camera is needed.
• Make the alert visible. The LED matrix shows an icon for each sound, so the person doesn't need to hear the alert.
• Keep the build simple. Given the limited tools and time at the hackathon, we narrowed the list to three critical sounds (falling, glass breaking, and fire alarm), plus a background-noise class so that everyday sounds are ignored.

We sketched the full flow before building anything: home audio goes to the microphone, then the classifier, then a critical-sound check, then a 10-second countdown, and finally a notification to family (see system_architecture.png). We then split into a hardware group and a software group.