Track-Care

A hackathon project for elderly care: medication reminders and geofencing to keep track of family members who might wander. Built at UNIFEI across two weekends.

The Hackathon

Two-phase event. First weekend in São Paulo at Samsung’s office for ideation. Second weekend back at UNIFEI for development. We built the whole thing in that timeframe.

The Features

• Medication tracking with customizable reminder times
• Virtual fencing - draw boundaries on a map, get alerts when the person leaves the safe zone
• Family dashboard for monitoring

The idea was simple: help families keep track of elderly relatives with cognitive decline. Know when grandma forgets her meds. Know when grandpa wanders out of the house.

The Tech

Built on COBORFF, my PHP boilerplate from that era. CodeIgniter + Bootstrap + REST API + Facebook auth. I’d done enough projects with that stack that I made a reusable starter. Some PHP blogger even linked it in tutorials, which was nice.

Google Maps integration for the geofencing. Database-driven polygon storage for the safe zones.

The Judges Were Wrong

We got discouraged by judges who said the form factor was impossible. “You can’t make this practical for elderly people to carry around.”

We had a working prototype in a 5x5 cm cube. I was convinced that with proper engineering we could shrink it to watch size.

A few years later, everyone has smartwatches and AirTags. The technology caught up to what we were trying to build in a university hackathon. We were just early.

What Happened

Never launched. The judge feedback killed our momentum. In retrospect, we should have pushed forward anyway. The validation came eventually - just from Apple and Samsung instead of us.

Lesson learned: don’t let people who can’t see the future tell you what’s possible.