Design of Detachable Address Book for Telephone Speed-Dial Programming

The debilitating effects on memory of Dementia or Alzheimer’s can impair a person’s ability to use a telephone and the freedom to contact loved ones. Family members and nursing staff understand these effects best because of the time spent helping make calls or correcting misplaced ones. A solution to this problem is associating numbers with photos so a person suffering from Dementia for example, could contact loved ones at the touch of a screen, rather than have to memorize ten digit phone numbers. This phone will have a detachable handheld programmer to input speed dials. Programming this handheld required familiarizing ourselves with its most important component, a programmable microcontroller. Next, we strived to understand the software that programs it with the intention of ultimately programming the microcontroller to give the handheld device address book functionality. The implementation of a linked list data structure will play a crucial role in this by allowing contacts to be stored within the microcontroller’s memory constructively. We have been successful in storing data within non-volatile memory which is the first step in creating this linked list. Furthermore, we are able to design projects that incorporate the functionality of a light, button, and display. Currently we are merging these functions with the code implementation of a linked list. This will allow a person to use the handheld device as an address book and transfer contacts to the programmable phone.