Communication Android to PC

Question

I'm working on a project I'm trying to present to a conference and I need a bit of help pointing in the right direction.

The app I'm building is supposed to monitor the elderly. When the phone detects a sudden change from the accelerometer/motion sensors (aka the patient fell or lost balance), the phone sends an emergency message containing info about the patient (location, medical and personal facts stored in a database, etc.)

The help I need is in establishing a communication protocol between the Android device and the PC. I'm ok if I do it through a browser, or anything, but I've never built anything like that before and I'd really appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.

What should I research in order to establish such a communication protocol?

LE: I thought about sending an email from the device with the specified data to a GMail account and then retrieving the information from that email, processing it and displaying it in a browser-based app (Using php seems the most straight-forward way to go).

Answer 1

I guess you could try an internal wifi/tcp ip call, but that solution would require extra configuration to the network (to make sure its communication didn't get blocked) and extra preparations (in case the power to the PC went down, or the network itself went down).

Couldn't you sms the message? email it? and/or even initiate a phone call and turn on the speaker phone?

Depending on where you want to implement this, there are some phone plans that are SMS only.

After all, wouldn't it be be better if such an emergency message could reach the nurse (a neighbor, or a family member) even if that person wasn't sitting in front of their computer screen? And of course, there is no reason you couldn't have the phone send out more than one sms message (one to the nurse, one to your computer through an sms gateway like Voxeo or Twilio, and perhaps one to someone else as well)

By the way, you may also want to build in a loud noise (with a flashing screen) and a 10 or 20 seconds count-down before the message is sent out. This way, this would give a chance for the elderly to cancel the alert before it's being sent out. This techniques is currently being used for potential stroke victims and potential victims of heart attacks. People are much more likely to trigger an alert before they lose consciousness if they know they can cancel the alert if it turns out to have been a false alarm (and of course, you could always have a big button that would make the alert go out immediately if that's what the patient really wanted, or have aa special preference that would make the alert go out immediately if that's what the hospital/nurses really wanted instead).