SafeRing provides you with a convenient and accessible emergency call button right at your fingertips. You can also configure it to perform other actions on your phone such as snapping pictures or controlling the music player.

 Your smart phone does allow you to quickly report an emergency situation or call for help; however, in some situations, such as an assault or medical emergency,  there might not be enough time to grab the phone and call for help or your phone might not be even easily accessible. 

The miniature switch on the ring, carefully designed to avoid accidental activation can text your location to a friend in an emergency. Pressing the button on SafeRing triggers the phone to send text messages to a pre-defined list of contacts with your exact location. The location is also updated with follow-up text messages at your desired time interval. In addition, the trigger can be configured to start a distraction alarm on your phone.

Should you take care of your elderly parent but you are so busy to be with them? SafeRing  can help you give them timely response when they are in an emergency or if they fall and can't reach the phone. SafeRing prevents serious problems while preserving your parents' self-reliance. 

Project Philosophy 

Our idea was not to make a new cool gadget to impress friends, but a practical device that in addition to its multiple functions, gives people more confidence in facing emergency situations. We studied many comfortable and aesthetic rings and realized that none of them exceed 2 mm width on the sides of the shank. Therefore, we limited our electronics to the head and lower part of the shank and kept its sides comfortably thin. The results are the two designs presented here. One with a larger head and a normal shank and one with a bit thicker lower shank but without a head.

After fabricating a working prototype and making sure we can fit all the electronics in this very constrained real estate, we asked our designer to come up with a unique design with the flexibility to adjust with the ring size. We gave him the exact dimensions of electronics, and this is what he came up with, a beautiful, comfortable, and unique design perfectly suited for everyday use.

                                                      Final design of SafeRings

 The ring connection to the phone is Bluetooth 4.0 (BLE). We designed the minimal BLE circuit to be able to fit it in the limited space. The PCB is super thin and flexible, just the right size for the ring. The most space demanding electronic part is the battery. We use the widely available BR1225 battery. The battery is user replaceable and lasts up to 6 months with only emergency usage. we will also provide an extra battery to cover you for a whole year. 

Avoiding accidental alert trigger has been one of our most important design considerations from the beginning. We tested a slide button mechanism which was secure but a bit inconvenient to use, therefore we switched to a push button and used software decoding to distinguish between real and accidental triggers by defining a certain combination of short and long presses for each action that are also easy to be triggered. (e.g. a short press followed by a long press can send your location and two long presses activates the camera shutter). Some useful actions that would be available to be set from the mobile (android or iOS) app are:

• Send SOS message (only for Android, because of the security restriction in iOS system)
• Call someone
• Voice record
• Camera shutter
  
• Change mobile profile
• Play/Stop music

 We will try to add more functionality (e.g., flash light control, in-call recording, etc.) to our product but the priority will be to polish the security aspect.

Ring Size

We plan to provide the following sizes for SafeRing. We will contact you later to ask for your desire size.

Compatible Phones

SafeRing works with BLE (Bluetooth 4.0). It is compatible with all android phones with BLE running Android 4.3 or newer. Nexus 4, 5, Galaxy S3, S4, S5, HTC One, Moto X, G, LG G2 are some of the devices that work with SafeRing.

iOS devices became BLE enabled after iPhone 4s.  iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s are also BLE compatible. SafeRing's functions are limited on iOS due to the extra security restriction present in iOS.

Project Status 

We have designed and fabricated the required electronics. If the project is funded successfully, we immediately start finalizing the design of ring housings and optimizing the electronics. Our team has decided to dedicate 50% of this product's benefit to support those organization and groups which promote women's right worldwide. If we receive 1000 orders, the mass production of the part will allow us to provide the ring at a much lower cost. The complete timetable of the project is given bellow.

About Our Team

Highly educated members of this team are very passionate to utilize technology for a better and safer society. Our diverse but still related backgrounds in electrical engineering, computer science and architecture together with over 35 combined years of experience both in academia and industry were really constructive  in putting our ideas together and coming up with SafeRing.

Acknowledgement

We want to thank all of our friends who had helped us bringing this project to this stage. Special thanks to Maral, Mehdi, Shana and Chelsey for their help with the video.