Many University campuses have blue light emergency stations people can go to if they are in distress. John Yin, Cordelia Lee and Adrian Tung have made a device that will do something that these stations can’t, their project can take and send a picture of the situation. The prototype device has a microcontroller, bluetooth module and a camera. When the take picture button is pressed it will snap a picture, save it on the smart phone that it is connected to via bluetooth and send it directly to an emergency number. The emergency number can be campus police for example.
This could be adapted to a door bell system by changing the bluetooth module to an ethernet module and have the captured image sent to your phone when someone is at your door. Of course this was a device that was built for a class project so the hardware devices needed to be used, if it was being designed from scratch I am thinking that the smart phone could be made to launch an application when a special button combination is pressed such as volume up twice fast. The application could take a picture, transmit video and audio, and send GPS coordinates of the phone to campus police. I guess the big thing here is for enhanced information, the receive end must be equipped to get it. Most provinces and states have spend millions of dollars to allow their 911 services to have the ability to receive the GPS locations of cell phones that call 911. Could the next upgrade to 911 include the ability to send live video and pictures?
Thanks for sending this in Bruce, to see more projects like this be sure to check them out here.