text2go

SMS portion of the application in use
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Homelessness is a pervasive issue in major urban areas in America, and one major aspect of the homeless experience is access to bathrooms. While this affects every homeless individual, it presents significant obstacles to menstruating homeless women and those with children. Years of research and first-hand accounts have been publicized, yet this issue is still largely overlooked. Although reading the testimonials of homeless individuals in regards to this problem is what directly inspired us to create this, our app can be used by anyone, anywhere, because being able to use the bathroom is a universal right.

We used Twilio, a messaging service API that allows one to send automated responses to text messages from users. We achieved this by using Flask API, which allowed us to establish webhooks that helped us interact between the Twilio API and our mobile phone. We compiled data (addresses, place names, cities, states, and codes) from various sources, including social media pages that publish bathroom locations and codes, and parsed through it in order to determine which bathroom locations to send to the user. Furthermore, instead of using a live website with Flask in order to interact with our API, we used an web server ngrok in order to temporarily interact with our API. Finally we used heroku in order to host our website.

One of the challenges we faced was finding ample and adequate sources for the data we were looking for and extracting it from various Twitter/Instagram pages. Another slight obstacle was the server timing out and having to restart it after two hours of use. Finally, designing a presentable website in tandem with dealing with the other aspects of this project was more difficult than we anticipated given our lack of thorough experience in web development.