HelpSignal

UI/UX

Inspiration

On average, an EMT can take 10 minutes to arrive at the scene of an emergency while incidents such as choking or heart attacks can turn fatal within 3 minutes. Those 10 minutes between the start of the emergency and when help arrives are vital in the patient's survival.

What it does

Any surrounding good-Samaritan may use the app, press SOS, use their voice to explain the situation, and the app will ping nearby certified CPR, EMT, or any person will relevant experience who can arrive on the scene before 911 can.

HelpSignal is used to make the most of the time between the start of an emergency and when ambulances arrive

How we built it

We used React Native and Expo Development to build the application, targeting Android for live voice transcription from expo-speech-recognition and sending the transcription after recording to Cloudflare Worker. The Cloudflare Worker then uses the BAAI general embedding model to vectorize the transcription. The categories of needed certifications or experience are in a vector database, and vector search is done to get the most relevant person for the situation.

The account system is on Amazon RDS, as well as the current emergencies. After an emergency is categorized, it's put onto the database, which is called on every refresh by people with accounts and certifications. A map is shown on the page to show locations of emergencies.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulty implementing the audio as none of us had access to iOS development kit, nor macOS laptops for running Expo Development on iOS. In order to record and collect audio to transcribe live, an Android system was needed. We spent a considerable amount of time setting up the Android SDK.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Throughout this project, we encountered many different roadblocks, which required determination and flexibility to get around. As a group, we were able to effectively communicate and pivot roles on the fly. As a result, we all stayed occupied and spent all 36 hours wisely designing and implementing different systems. Our feature of using Cloudflare Workers to use vector search was a big accomplishment for us, as well as getting authentication and accounts working with the stored certifications and experience, and an engaging UI/UX.

What we learned

Coming into this project, few of us had experience with React Native, and some of us had no experience coding with TypeScript and React in general. This seeming roadblock forced us to learn syntax and techniques for working with the technologies on the fly. Additionally, getting Expo Development working with Gradle and running on an Android simulator was a big learning experience for how Android development works.

What's next for HelpSignal

Being able to grow HelpSignal through advertising and social media would not only allow HelpSignal to become more popular, but would also improve the app. As more and more users get onboarded, there's more people available to help others, and therefore more of a chance that there's people to help in case of emergency. Using WebSockets instead of database updating for the emergencies would also let updating of emergencies be more instantaneous, and push notifications would allow for people not currently using the app to be notified when someone needs help. Connecting users with 911 while submitting an emergency would also allow for police to still be notified as normal.

Tech stack