Blue Safe

Feel Safer with just a press of a button!

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Inspiration

Life is unpredictable, and scary for a lot of people. Blue Safe aims to give comfort and a realistic solution to traveling alone, or just being in a situation that isn't ideal. Women in particularly are targeted every day, and while this isn't exclusively for them, we believe this app can help combat the ongoing problem of human trafficking, abuse, or sexual harassment.

What it does

This app brings simple solution for our users. Simply hold the button until you feel safe. If you hold it too long, or let go you will be required to enter a pin number. If that pin isn't entered, than your emergency contacts and the authorities will be contacted and given your location.

How we built it

Our team developed this application in react-native. We wanted to have a way to quickly make an app for both android and ios environments. We are utilizing an express backend that was written in typescript to take care of all of our API calls. This includes creating logs of locations, dates, and our twillio messages.

Challenges we ran into

We originally had issues with running React Native code on iOS phones because none of us had Macs. We were still wanting to develop an app for a phone though so Android Studio was the way to go. However, a lot of issues would show up due to Android Studio taking some time to set up. It took us a good second to be able to start developing and running React Native applications. We also originally had the challenge of how we were going to implement some of the features. Some of these features would however ultimately be cut due to the fact that we only had 24 hours to complete it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team was very familiar with the web application development with react, but even with that experience we had a lot of trouble transitioning to react-native. The development environment proved especially challenging as we had to use android studio to host our phone emulator and keeping track of all the compilation proved tricky. We are very proud of overcoming the environmental obstacles. We also worked really well in terms of connecting our front end and back end together. Open communication over what needed to get done really helped us be very effective with our time.

What we learned

We learned a ton about react-native, mobile development, and just gained experience in working together as a software team. These technologies may not be what we use in our careers, but we believe that the experience we had as a team definitely will be translatable.

What's next for Blue Safe

We want to see blue safe develop more features. We really enjoyed the simplistic design, but there can be more done for topics such as amber alerts, or helping people feel comfort and provide safety in times of crisis. Language support would also be very important to us. Our audience we believe will be very broad, so we want to make it available not only for ios and android, but for people all over the world.

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