HelpUs

HelpUs, a way to quickly get help from the community when you need it the most.

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Inspiration

Make helping easier during/after disasters for both who need help and give help.

What it does

If you want to help, or need to get help, this mobile app have you back. Based on your location you can see if there's a person or group of people near you that you can help, whether it's during or after a disaster (earthquake/tornadoes,wildfire etc.). Users can draw attention to a location nearby by dropping a marker on the map location and describe the situation. For example, suppose an earthquake happened and people are trapped under a collapsed building, the user who have access to the app can put a marker on the location, describe the situation, and other users who are using the app would be able to see help is needed in that location, potentially including information crucial for first-responders as well.

How I built it

This is a mobile app built using React-native, a javascript framework for the front end, and we integrated the google-maps api to our maps so people can see who needs help and where they are. To retrieve and save the information submitted by the user, we used the REST architecture and set up a Flask-based service in the backend and made use of MongoDB for storage.

Challenges I ran into

First, we decided on using Flutter and Firebase as our stack as they are the technology we are interested in learning in the beginning, but we ran into a lot of set up issues and due the lack of time in hackathon, we decided to try a different mobile app development stack using React Native, which is also new to us, and Flask as backend as our team members are more comfortable with Python. In addition, connecting to the google maps api was challenging as more set up work was needed and we also had some trouble setting up our server on the cloud.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

First, we were proud that at the end, even though we wasted a lot of time on setting up we still managed to stick with the hackathon and have something done in the end (yikes), and it turned out to be a great solution as react-native mobile apps are cross-platform. Most importantly, we learned a lot during this hackathon despite none of us were familiar with the tools we used, but now we are more familiar with these tools and we will feel more comfortable to use them in the future. Can't wait what mobile app is going to do!

What I learned

How to develop mobile app in general, and specifically how to develop in react native How to use set up and query against a non-relational database (MongoDB) and set up a running server that can parse get and post request using Flask. Working with teammates is important, we split out tasks really well (2 for front end 2 for backend) and without this we wouldn't have been able to make a presentable app.

What's next for HelpUs

Feature-wise: Fully connect the front end and the backend , real time data, improved UI, route planning based on severity so users who wants to help/authorities can prioritize where to go first. Allow image to be attached to the locations so more info can be provided to others. Future for the app: After fully connecting to the backend and some more fine tuning we can publish the app on both google and ios store.

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