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Help!

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Android CS9033

Software Design Document

CS 9033: Mobile Application Development

Mamoon Ismail Khalid

Trishla Shah

Chai-Chi

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DATE VERSION DESCRIPTION

11/15/2015 1 Initial Design Document

12/20/2015 2 Final Design Document

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Table of Contents

Topic Page

1. Problem Statement and Solution 1

2. Current Solution & Related Work

3

3. Solution

5 3. Use Cases 6

4. MVC Framework 7

5. Other Components 10

6. Database Design and Schema

7. User Interface Screens

14

8. Features Built and Future Developments

Future Development

24

9. Project Member Breakdown

25

10. Project Milestones

27

11. Bibliography

7. Bibliography

28

28

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1.Problem Statement and Introduction

Most of us who have lived in “the big cities” for all our lives, we feel safe when we are out for a night

on the town. But traveling alone through certain areas, especially late at night, often makes everybody

nervous. We would feel a lot safer, generally, if there was someone there making the walk with us.

Thankfully, if you own a mobile device, you’re never truly alone. If you have an ongoing concern for

your personal safety, use our Help app.

In case of a medical emergency. For example, a heart attack strikes when no is around. You don’t

have time to think or do anything but scream once for help and this activates the app. It saves lives!

In case of a robbery, mugging or unsolicited behavior like a rape. These situations do not give enough

time to do or say anything .But luckily you involuntarily happen to say “Help!” and this triggers the

app and you may be saved. Got into a road accident in a lonely area? Have a few minutes before

losing consciousness, you got to say “Help”. And you will be saved. Realize your brakes are failing?

Shout for help and let your friends know you are in need.

When there is a natural calamity. Disaster strikes and there is no way to get in touch with people. You

are stuck somewhere and maybe your phone is a little far away. Scream “Help” and you may be

saved. Someone following you late at night. See something suspicious going on. Whisper “Help”.

What if you are a realtor? This app is so useful whilst showing houses to unknown people.

The best time to prepare for a disaster is BEFORE! No one likes to think about emergencies and

disasters, but you need to be prepared. If you are caught in a dangerous situation, you won’t have the

time to open your phone, make a call, inform someone where you are exactly. This is the problem we

are trying to solve. This app will help keep you and your loved ones safe by making sure you have

someone who knows where you are.

This app consists of a sign up for every user of the phone .The user must enter his/her emergency

contacts which is stored in the app. When the user of the phone shouts or even says the word “Help”,

a message is sent out to his/her emergency contacts regarding his/her location. This therefore

commands safety of the user of the phone and app. His/her whereabouts are known and she/he can

be saved

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The UI of this app is very simple and easy to use .So even elders who may be technically challenged

can set up the app. The false alarms are taken care of. Whenever the sound “Help” is heard and the

user does not want the message to be sent out .There is a time delay of one minute within which the

user must enter a 4-digit pin onto the screen, in order to stop the message from sending.

2.Current Solutions and Related Work

HelPls

HelPls which helps send SMS to your friends or family or police with your location through GEO

code and Direct Map. In order to launch the app, users have to shake their phones and press some

buttons to send SMS. However, the truth is that when users are in emergency, they don’t have time

to do all the things above. Sometimes, doing that puts them in more dangerous place. So, our feature

is that users use voice to launch the app makes it easier to use in an emergency. Also false alarms are

taken care of with the 4-digit pin code to stop the sending of the SMS.

Kitestring

Kitestring which is a web-based service that checks in with users and sends an alert to pre-selected

contacts. Kitestring works through users’ inaction. Users need to visit the free service’s website at

kitestring.io to customize their SOS message and activate an SMS message broadcast that will be sent

out in 30 minutes, 2 hours, 5 hours or 12 hours. Once the time is up, users get a check in message and

if for some reasons they’re unable to respond to that text withing 5 minutes, Kitestring will let their

contacts know. Our feature is different from it because we don’t use web-based service. We set up

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our own database and store the information. And we don’t have check in messages to assure if we are

safe or not. Check in messages would be annoying to a user.

SafeTrek

SafeTrek which lets users alert the police when they are in an unsafe situation, but with a failsafe in

case they don’t need help. When users launch the app, they place their thumbs on the Safe button. If

they release their thumbs off the button, they are asked to enter a 4-digit code. If they don’t enter the

code, the police are notified. If they do, nothing happens. Our feature is that we’ll get an icon on the

tool bar to notify us the SMS will be sent in 5 mins. And we can can cancel it within that time. This

way, some unpurposed SMS reduce.

Red Panic Button

Allows users to send their GPS location to pre-set emergency contacts with just one touch. Our app

consists of voice recognition which helps the user to not touch anything in the app. No mechanism to

abort false alarms.

Social Alert

It sends out a message to your friends and relatives in case of an emergency or crime. Integrating with

social networks most of us already use such as Facebook, Twitter and text messages, you can send out

a custom emergency message with your exact location, helping authorities pinpoint exactly when and

where you are. This again requires the user to press a button. We are using voice recognition instead.

It does not have any way of aborting false alarms.

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3.Use Cases

1. In case of a medical emergency. For example, a heart attack strikes when no is around. You don’t

have time to think or do anything just scream once for help and this activates the app. It saves lives!

2. In case of a robbery, mugging or unsolicited behavior like a rape. These situations do not give

enough time to do or say anything .But luckily you involuntarily happen to say “ Please Help Me! “

and this triggers the app and you may be saved.

3. When there is a natural calamity. Disaster strikes and there is no way to get in touch with people.

You are stuck somewhere and maybe your phone is a little far way. Scream “Please Help Me” and

you may be saved4. Someone following you late at night. See something suspicious going on.

Whisper “Please Help Me”

5. Realtors or any professionals who need to network and meet people who are unknown, require a

safety measure. This app can be used by them.

6. When you meet with an accident and maybe no one is around, use the app to send your location

and you are saved

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4.Architecture Diagram The Database and CMU dict interacts with the entire application

The background Service Acitivity is using GPS

The setProfileActivity,EditUserDetails,MyDetails all interact with the SQLiteDatabase

and Contact book

The Main Activtity interacts with the SMS application of the phone and GPS and

background

Serivce Acitivity as well as all other Acitivities

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5.MVC FRAMEWORK

Models:

Person: This is a sign up page for the person who downloads the app and wants to use it.

He/She must enter Name and Phone number. We store this information in a database

Views:

Main.xml : The layout where the Audio Recognizer is running in the background. It is the

main screen view

activity_setprofile.xml : This is the Create Account xml file where the user is prompted to set

up the profile the first time the user installs the app and also adds their Emergency Contacts

Mydetails.xml : Where the user can view their own input information and that of their

Emergency Contacts.

Edit.xml :. This is the layout where the user can edit his Emergency Contacts and his own

information.

Controllers:

MainActivity

This is the main activity .This also consists of a speech to text convertor code. This is used to

generate an alert message sent out to emergency contacts when a person screams for the unique

phrase to trigger the Help Application. The sound is taken in through the microphone of the phone

and this code will set up the scenario for sending the message.

SetProfileActivity

The name and phone number of the phone user is added here. We use TextEdits. The user is

asked to set up their password as well .This code is used when there is a false alarm and enables

the user to abort the alert. All this is stored in a database for future access. There is a button to

access the contact book and you can add contacts into your app .The database helper is used to

store the contacts in the database. There is a SET profile button and a Home button to go back to

the Main Acvtivity. There is a field that asks the user to set up their customizable message that

is sent out as an alert text to their emergency contacts.

DatabaseHelper

This java class works to sync up the user information and the emergency contacts information in

the SQLite Database.

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MyDetails

This opens up the UI for editing your details and that of your Emergency contacts in the

Database.The user can add or delete contacts using the phonebook as well. You can also change

the customized message sent within the alert text.

EditUserDetails

This will enable you to see and change the people you to add as emergency contacts. Just a

Textview of all the people. You can select a contact and delete it with a button Delete. This will

contain Go back to main activity button and also Add contact button. The database is accessed

and we can see a listView of all the people you have added as contacts. You can also edit your

own name and phone number within this activity. Name and Phone number as well as the

password set up by the user can be edited using this Activity. These are stored in a database and

we will overwrite these values in the database.

BackgroundService

This activity gives the GPS coordinates of the person seeking help. This activity consists of a

GPS running as a service in the background in order to retrieve the users current location in order

to be sent out within an SMS.

SplashScreen/ImageView in Main Activity

This is used to just display the splash screen for 3 s when the app is started and the recognizer for

the voice recognition is being set up. It uses a Handler to run this splash screen for 3000ms.

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6.Other Components:

Async Task in Main Activity: This AsyncTask launches a Listener for the Audio. Recognizer

in the background to match the phrase that you enter in the app.

List Adapters: Simple List adapters to show the emergency contacts as you add then and when

you want to view them

CMU-Dict: This is the dictionary that the recognizer in the main activity uses to match the words

with your phrase. It has a collections of thousands of words and its associated pronunciations. We

used this to create a unique SOS Phrase that is not confused with simple, ordinary life

conversational sentences. We used “Please Help me “in the end because if we used anything that

started with “I……” it would send it a lot of false alarms.

CMU Pocket Sphinx

Library is distributed as architecture-independent pocketsphinx-android-5prealpha-nolib.jar and

binary .so files for different hardware architectures.

In Android Studio you need to place jar file in app/libs folder and jni .so files

into app/src/main/jniLibs folder.

We put the resource asset files in assets/ directory of your project. But in order to make them available

for pocketsphinx files should have physical path, as long as they are within .apk they don't have one.

Assets class from pocketsphinx-android provides a method to automatically copy asset files to external

storage of the target device. edu.cmu.pocketsphinx.Assets#syncAssetssynchronizes resources reading

items from assets.lst file located on the top assets/.

This makes us of hashing and MD5. PocketSphinxAndroidDemo contains ant script that

generates assets.lst as well as .md5 files, look for assets.xml

We made use of the CMU Pocket Sphinx speech recognizer. It uses g streamer to automatically split

the incoming audio into utterances to be recognized, and offers services to start and stop recognition.

Currently, the recognizer requires a language model and dictionary file. These can be automatically

built from a corpus of sentences using the Online Sphinx Knowledge Base Tool. Example launch files,

language models, and dictionary files can be found in the demo directory of the package.

The voice_cmd example controls a mobile base using commands such as "move forward" or "stop".

The robocup example uses some of the standard items and names from the

RoboCup@Home contest, for instance, it should recognize "hello, my name is Michael" or "Bring

me the Original Pringles"

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How the word recognition works:

In example above trigram “is one of” is queried. Each node contains “next pointer” to the beginning of

successors list. Separate array for each ngram order is maintained. Each node contains quantized

weights: probability and backoff. Nodes are stored in bit array, i.e. minimum amount of bits required

to store next pointers and word IDs are used.

In the main activity that uses the pocket Sphinx library, there is a SpeechRecognizer implemented and

encapsulated within an Async Task by us.

public void onResult(Hypothesis hypothesis) {} that’s is called when we end the application

ourselves.

public void onEndOfSpeech() {} that’s called if the recognizer discovers an end of speech.

Both displayed the input audio to a string and then matches the input audio string with the

KEYWORD_PHRASE which we have preloaded into the application as “Please Help Me”. We used

this audio-to-string feature of the pocketshpnix recognizer and used it to trigger out application into

doing other stuff such as shring location, sending message and prompting the password for SMS abort.

We found this approach much better than using AT&T API as first suggested by the professor, but

PocketSphinx Recognizer solves our purpose in a much less complicated manner.

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7.Database Design and Schema

The DatabaseHelper class is consists of all functions that the application uses to store data in tables. A

local SQLiteManager is used for the database. It consists of the following tables to store data specific

to the users as follows:

1. userDetails

This table is used to store details that are relevant to the user. CREATE TABLE userDetails

(

fname TEXT,

lname TEXT,

contact TEXT PRIMARY KEY,

password TEXT

)

2. emergencyContacts

This table is used to store all emergency contacts that the user wants. Whenever needed, a

message is sent only to these contacts with a customizable message and location of the user.

CREATE TABLE emergencyContacts

(

name TEXT,

contact TEXT,

PRIMARY KEY(name, contact)

)

3. phraseTable

This table is used to store phrases for the user. Based on the user preferences, the phrase to be

sent to emergency contacts can be added or deleted from this table.

CREATE TABLE phraseTable

(

id TEXT Primary Key ,

userPhrase TEXT ,

FOREIGN KEY (id) REFERENCES userDetails (fname)

)

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8.Attempt to run Voice Recognition as a

Background Service

We tried to implement the running of the recognizer as a background service using the

following Activities.

We were successful in getting a runnable task even when the app was not open as shown in

the screenshot below.

The "testttttttttttttttt" is a string in the background service task and shows that the Runnable

MyTask is called every few seconds even when the app is not open.

This was implemented by making use of the service and binding and messaging.

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( Reference: Professor Jeffrey Bickford’s Slides)

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9.USER INTERFACE SCREENS

1. The Main Activity Screen with a Create A/C button to set up the user profile.

2. This is the UI for setting up of the profile for the user.

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3. Home Screen after account is created with changed button name MY DETAILS

4. This is the Viewing of details set up by the user

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5. My Details screen for entering your name, phone number, the message content.

6. Pick Emergency Contact from Phonebook

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7. View emergency Contacts screen

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8. Delete Emergency Contacts screen

9. Password Abort pop-up when Phrase detected

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10. Text message sent. Both GPS ON and GPS OFF messages shown here.

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10. Features built already and future

developments

Things implemented since last demo:

1. Customized the message that the user can send out as a text to his/her emergency contacts.

2. Changed the UI. Added animation translates to the buttons, changed colors and added a ripple effect.

3. Gave a larger delay for the password and abortion of sending of the alert.

4. Executed a code for background service in a runnable task but could not integrate it within the

project.

Feedback Received during final DemoPoster Presentation:

1. Having a database on a web server instead of using a local database. This would be helpful when

the user is using multiple devices and needed it on every device. This way he would not be required

to enter his details separately on every device.

2. Display a countdown timer when the password box springs up for message abort option. This would

allow the user to see how much time they have left to prevent a false positive being sent out.

3. Running the voice recognition as a background service so the user wouldn’t have to open the app

to send out an emergency notification (We already tried this out and have detailed why this was not

working to the TA and the professor during the demo).

4. Following up with 3), if the app is running in the background, the user should be notified by using

the phone vibration (or a ringtone) if the application is triggered and the message is about to be sent

out.

Future Developments:

1. App recognizes your voice even when the phone is locked and the voice recognition is running as

a background service and the microphone is always listening.

2. Sending emergency message via WhatsApp, Facebook and other social networking apps.

3. Video/Audio Recording of events taking place once the user shouts for help which can be used as

evidence later on.

4. Customize phrase used for sending out the alert message

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11. PROJECT MEMBER BREAKDOWN

5.1 Chai-Wei Chang

Asynctasks for the Audio Listener and Recognizer .Implementation of Pocketsphinx

library in the Main Activity

Background Service Activity which runs GPS in the background.

Using Google Voice API implemented ‘on button’ touch voice recognition (not used

finally)

Design Document 1-(Current Solutions and Architecture Diagram)

Enabled user to set their personal information which also includes adding multiple

contacts without using database (modified finally and not used)- SetProfileActivity

,Person Model

Stored voice into files every one minute in the background service (however, we couldn’t

figure how using AT&T API , so we don’t use this service)

5.2 Mamoon Ismail Khalid (Team Leader)

Led the application development – what features to be added

Worked with Chai-Wei Chang on the voice recognition in the Main activity and its

integration into the project.

Assisted Chai-Wei Chang on his research of the voice recognition using AT&T API

Found the idea of wrapping up the application so as to handle any unhandled

exception and tested the app for any conditions where it may crash and rectified the same

Tested the phrase sequences that work for the app using the CMU Dictionary that Pocket

Sphinx uses and found that Please Help Me is the unique phrase and anything that starts

with “ I ……” may cause false alarms.

Poster Presentation

Design Document (final)

Presentation (first prototype)

Splash Screen image view part of UI

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5.3 Trishla Shah

Researched and found the Pocket Sphinx Library and found their base demo on GitHub

implemented in the project.

Added to the main activity the function of displaying an alert dialog box to abort false alarms.

Added to the main activity the function of sending an SMS with GPS location on voice

recognition.

Implemented a database helper and used it to store user information and emergency contacts-

Database Helper.

The activity for setting up a profile and adding emergency contacts – SetProfileActivity and a

model Person.

The activity for editing entered details of the user in case they need to change their contacts or

edit their other details – EditUserDetails.

The activity for displaying to the user their details and emergency contacts – MyDetails.

Final integration and testing of the voice recognition in the main activity with the rest of the

project.

Design Document 1

Assisted Mamoon with Poster presentation

Design Document (final)

Front end UI screens: layouts, styles, buttons, TextViews, colors EditViews,

animations, ripple effect, Splash Screen.

Attempted to send push notifications to users using Google Cloud Messaging but failed

to do so.

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11. PROJECT MILESTONES

DATE TASKS COMPLETED

10/18/2015

o

Initial Design Document

4/2/2014

o

Base User Interface completion o Standalone functionality

implementation

o Update design document

11/2/2015

o

Initial Prototype Presentation

12/6/2015

o

Initial wiring of android application with amazon web

service o Refining and Testing of UI

4/15/2015

o

Integration of android application with the web server

CMU-Dictionary and final prototype ready for

demonstration.

12/15/2015

o

Presentation at LC400

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12. BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. “The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.” http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict

2. “APKtool documentation and wiki” https://code.google.com/p/android-apktool/

3. “Speech Recognizer without using PocketSphinx”

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/SpeechRecognizer.html

4. “The PocketSphinx Library”

http://sourceforge.net/p/cmusphinx/discussion/help/thread/4ee9e2b5/ http://sourceforge.net/p/cmusphinx/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/pocketsphinx-

android/jni/Android.mk

5. “Android-er” Apply Animation on Button

http://android-er.blogspot.com/2012/02/apply-animation-on-button.html

6. “How to Send Push Notifications Using GCM Service?” Android Tutorial Blog N.p 22

Sept. 2014. Web http://programmerguru.com/android-tutorial/how-to-send-push-

notifications-using-gcm-service

7. “Dialogs.” Dialogs

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/dialogs.html

8. “SmsManager.” SmsManager

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/SmsManager.html