THE WITNESS ANGEL HANDBAG

The next step on our roadmap to the "Familiar"

The handbag is an interesting intermediary solution for a witness angel, because it offers enough space to host a small box and a battery, while remaining discrete and portable. It allows the device to be attached to a person, and not to a place like our VideoTestimony for Condominiums.

Our goal: to design a device capable of collecting both audio and video recordings of the environment over the course of a full day, with a minimal footprint.

This phase marks the first steps of the WitnessAngel project in the world of "embedded" software. For the general public, we will indeed no longer have enough with powerful microcomputers like the Raspberry Pi. We will need to recode some of our software bricks in low-level languages, to make them work on smaller chips, less powerful, less expensive, and especially less energy consuming.

In the longer term, we envision an intermittent Bluetooth connection with the wearer's smartphone to retrieve GPS data, digital signatures, or export encrypted containers to remote storage.

Discover our prototype of portable recorder

In early 2023, we obtained a working witness angel handbag device from a Raspberry Pi Zero mini-computer..

It is equipped with a clock, an E-paper screen, buttons, an activity LED; and, of course, connected to a wide angle camera and a microphone.

Integrated in a handbag, with the support of a large USB battery, this system can fulfill its role for a day, recording in "write only" what happens around the wearer, and storing the encrypted containers on his SD card.

Of course, this is only a demonstration: a real witness angel will require a much more advanced miniaturization and autonomy, as well as an adequate legal framework.

But this prototype already allows to test the good functioning of the concept from beginning to end, within the human and software ecosystem of Witness Angel. You can build one with our Witness Angel Handbag Tutorial.

The next step is to move forward with the design of an "industrializable" system, based on a printed circuit board designed by us. It will integrate chips dedicated to audio/video encoding, and maybe custom chips for our privacy-friendly encryption algorithm.