Sendinel will run on a SheevaPlug

We are happy to announce that during our research trip to South Africa, the Sendinel server will run on a SheevaPlug, which is a very small and cost-effective computer. It follows the Plug Computer concept.

We have two devices (on the picture together with the USB-UMTS sticks). The SheevaPlugs were generously provided by Dr. Bott KG.

We plan on running the Sendinel server on a SheevaPlug and access it via an additional terminal computer like a laptop.

The advantage for us is that we can already set-up everything here in Germany before the journey. The small dimension of the SheevaPlug allows us to take it with us in our luggage and just "plug it in" on-site. For accessing the web frontend only a computer with a browser and network access is needed.

Another advantage of the SheevaPlug is it's very low power consumption. This is especially important in an environment where electricity is an expensive good.

Thanks again to Dr. Bott KG for supporting Sendinel with the SheevaPlugs. We will put them to good use.

Preparing our research trip to South Africa

The hot phase in developing the initial version of Sendinel has started some weeks ago. We, the seven bachelor students from the HPI in Potsdam/Germany, work full-time on Sendinel now until the end of June. This means that we can focus fully on shipping a good and meaningful end product. If you want to follow the development in code feel free to watch our open Github repository. And watching the network graph is hopefully going to give you a good understanding of the speed with which we are progressing currently.

Our aim for the first big milestone is to implement a feature set which enables us to do user testing. That is going to happen on a research trip to South Africa from March 23rd to March 28th 2010, where our whole team will try to get first-hand feedback from the users. We will also do user studies on the working environment there. This will hopefully give us a good understanding of the conditions and needs of the users.

The research trip will take us to the Living Lab of SAP in Mpumalanga near the Kruger National Park in the east of South Africa.
This video by SAP provides a good inside view of the Living Lab.

This map shows the location of one of the clinics:


Bigger Map

In the next weeks we will post more information on the trip preparation and the project progress.

Approaching the first Milestone

Some weeks ago we have started implementing Sendinel and we think it is time now to share some information about the first milestone which is due in the middle of March.

The basic idea of our system is to improve the communication between a hospital or clinic and it's patients. For this a computer system will be on-site. It can be used by the patients of the clinic to achieve the following tasks:

• Appointment reminders Patients can schedule reminders e.g. for follow-up examinations or medication pick-up. The reminders will be sent via SMS or Voice Call and a calendar entry can be pushed to the patient's mobile phone via Bluetooth.


• Notifications Patients can sign-up for being notified about subjects like events in the hospital or when specialist are present. The notifications can be sent by the hospital staff via SMS or Voice Call.


• Information display Videos, texts and pictures can be accessed by the patients.

A Voice Call is an automatically created call conducted by a text-to-speech engine.

A first release version is not due until April but we are committed to deliver a package easy to install and well-documented then. If you want to be on the cutting edge, you are welcome to clone directly from the GitHub repository. The master and develop branches reflect the current state of the project ...