Father creates alert system to know when his autistic son needs to use the bathroom

Scott is a teenager who suffers from autism and is non-verbal. Due to his limited communication abilities, he can’t always warn his parents of when he needs to go to the bathroom. When the need arises, Scott simply starts to take of his clothes – a signal for his parents to take him to the bathroom. However, especially at night when Scott is alone in his room, his parents have no way of knowing when he needs to use the toilet and are often too late.

His father, Alain, who describes himself as an “hobby inventor”, decided to create a gadget that would immediately inform him when his son started to undress – the signal for going to the bathroom. “The challenge, as always with projects for children with special needs, is to build a safe device that will not hurt them and that they cannot swallow anything”, Alain explains.

The ideia he came up with was to “sew a transmitter module in each of his sleep trousers. If he tries to remove the pants, the switch will be pulled and the receiver will beep.” After a few protypes, Alain came up with the best set up, which he called the UD-Alert, making 5 transmitter modules that he sewed into his son’s pants and 2 receiving modules so he can place on in the living room and another in the bedroom.

They’ve used this solution for over 5 months and Alain says it has been a success. There have been no more accidents, as his parents can get to Scott immediately. The system has even worked as a way for them to understand when Scott is most likely to have to go to the bathroom and for the family to set up a schedule.

Alain is continuing to work on this project, with some improvements already in the works like making the transmitter modules removable (right now they have to be removed and sewn again when the pants need washing).

Alain has shared the entire list of materials, softwares and instructions to reproduce this system, which can be found in one of the links bellow.

Instructions and more information:

https://www.instructables.com/UD-Alert-for-a-Boy-With-Autism/
https://hackaday.io/project/120229-ud-alert
https://alainsprojects.com/2019/09/07/ud-alert-v1-0/

https://youtu.be/M8IkVmR95Ns