My parent lives alone. After a fall that nobody noticed for hours, I decided to build something that would.
Four months, 121 versions, and approxi...
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How does your app anonymize data?
Good question. The whole security topic is really sensitive. All data is stored in an encrypted database. When I send something to the AI for analysis, it is anonymous. In other words, I don't share who is the data owner. I send certain aggregated data of stillness periods, and some GPS locations. I even tried to use an internal LLM: Gemini Nano, but its limitation of max allowed tokens were a big hit for me. The data volume can vary from user to user, and I can't be sure that I can always fit in the Gemini Nano restrictions.
I would say about encryption that app can't send encrypted data outside If an external side isn't able to decrypt them. So, there is a logical point when data will be decrypted. Is it point inside your app or outside?
Thank you for the questions. It is always a pleasure to clear things out so that they are well understand. That's the whole idea behind such posts. Clear information to reach more people, and help them with their tasks and challenges.
Let's start from the beginning. The database is encrypted. Usually, this is done, so that the data is protected, if someone wants to steal it from the device directly. When the app uses the data, it needs to decrypt it first, so that it is able to query it, analyze it, aggregate it, what ever is needed. So decryption happens on the device.
Decrypted data never exits the application, but this is different from the database encryption. The communication with the AI, the Resend API is encrypted. It is dump to send plain text data to external systems, and https is the usual way to do such things.
In the database, I need some personal data, like emails, and also keeps information, like locations, and when they were visited. Information in that plain, and descriptive way never leaves the application. We send to Gemini AI,in encrypted way, only summaries. By writing above 'anonymized', it is meant that Gemini AI does not know (nobody knows) whose is the person who has those patterns of sleep, movements and stillness periods.
Is the main goal of encryption protect data on user's device only? Does your app have other goals for encryption?
Did I understand you correctly? Your app anonymize data and then encrypt them and save to the database, isn't it? Is anonymizing performed before encryption?
The API key sharding pattern across 6 GCP projects is one of those pragmatic architectural decisions that separates real production thinking from tutorial-level code. I deal with a similar scaling problem on a financial data platform — generating unique analysis content for 8,000+ stock tickers across 12 languages. Rate limits from data APIs were the single biggest bottleneck until I built a rotation and fallback layer that handles throttling gracefully instead of failing hard.
Your travel intelligence state machine is also brilliant UX thinking. The false positive problem you described (5-7 urgent emails per vacation) is basically the alert fatigue problem that kills every monitoring system. I ran into the same thing with automated site health checks — if every anomaly triggers an alert, people just stop reading them. The solution is always contextual suppression, exactly like your HOME -> TRAVELING state approach. Curious whether you considered adding a manual "traveling" override so the user can preemptively silence it, or if the automatic detection handles edge cases well enough?
The main idea is the app to be installed on parents' devices. And they usually don't like to be bothered. And usually they don't know what to do with their devices. One early adopter wrote that his parents are holding their devices like gradates :D That is why I want to follow "Install and forget" principles and don't bother elderly people with anything. Otherwise, they can find it intrusive and just delete it.
Having in mind the above, manual traveling from the device itself will not fit in the whole picture. Of course, curious parents can open it and see some nice looking statistics, but no actions are required for them to do. Actually, I expect that the installation itself will be done by their children.
But I am planning some other important features. If there is stillness for 24h, theapp will take all the available GPS coordinates for the last 24 hours and send email, so that the children can trace what their parent did. I hope that for people with dementia, this is draw a path and can create a predictability template for the children to know where to search.
Another feature that I like to include is SMS notifications. But, let's see how it will go and what the early adopters give back as feedback. :)
Thanks!
The sensor HAL rebasing timestamps on flush is such a nasty gotcha — most people assume sensor data is live and never question it. The dual-clock comparison as a safety net is smart.
Has your app been blocked by Google?
Not blocked, yet :) I am in closed testing phase. In order to publish it in production, I need early adopters (testers) to play with it for 14 days. Once this validation phase pass, I can start the publishing procedure. :)