Personal Alert Button
30 December 2019
The Personal Alert Button is an entire system for providing care to vulnerable individuals at the touch of a button. It is developed primarily by GovTech Singapore, and operated in collaboration with other government agencies.
This is one of the main projects I worked on in my first year at GovTech, and I feel it’s a very meaningful one! The buttons are installed in users’ houses, so if anything happens and they need urgent medical help or are unsure of what to do, they can just press the button and describe their situation, which the button records as an audio clip. The call for help, along with the audio clip, will be routed to a care provider to respond.
It was featured on Channel 8 news!
- Built with Java Spring Boot (for backend services) and React (for web applications)
- Uses microservices architecture, with multiple self-contained services communicating with each other through HTTP calls and ActiveMQ messaging
- Deployed using Docker Swarm
- Databases used: MySQL, Cassandra
System Overview
My team handled the device management and client data mangement systems, as shown in this (simplified) diagram:
As this is an Internet of Things (IoT) project that involves hardware devices, we also have to handle registering the buttons into our system. We call this “on-boarding” devices. I developed a mobile web application for our installers to easily on-board buttons, by scanning the button’s QR code in the web app. Once scanned, the information “Button 123 is located at Unit XX” is then stored in our device management system.
When a button is pressed, the device management system uses the button ID to retrieve the corresponding unit, and the client management system retrieves the details of who is staying in that unit. The unit and client information is then sent to the case management system to alert the care provider.
The Personal Alert Button is currently being rolled out to selected households across Singapore.
