1_010_d_analogeunterstützung_CYBERCARE

Ein Webservice kombiniert mit einer Holtine. Über die Telefonnummer kann man seine Postleitzahl angeben und sein Problem beschreiben. Im Web können hilfsbereite Menschen hilfsbedürftige dadurch finden

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was simple, due to the current pandemic some of the most vulnerable members of society have also been the most helpless. Keeping in mind how much our grandparents now rely on their families to help them in this current crisis, be that with regards to getting their daily essentials such as food, completing chores such as walking the dog or just having someone to talk to about their worries. We began thinking about all the senior residents that don’t have family to talk with or help them in everyday life and we wanted to find a solution to make sure that if these people needed help with anything, they would be able to get it. We specifically designed the architecture keeping in mind that the people we wanted to help the most were senior residents and therefore tried to avoid them having to interact with a website.

What it does

CYBERCARE allows anyone that has a problem at this current time to report this over our hotline number. From there they can enter their Post code and describe their problem and how urgently they need help. We record the audio of their problem and display it to volunteers in their Area (same or nearby Postcode). Volunteers are now able to listen to nearby problems and choose a problem they think they can help with over our website. It is also possible to start a help request over our website as a text query.

How I built it

We first started by drafting our Ideas and deciding on solution exactly we wanted to provide. After a bit of research into possible voice API’s and further discussion of how we wanted the user to interact with CYBERCARE, we got started. We split and dedicated tasks into manageable chunks and got started with initial website design and the backend of our phone call API. After we had finally managed to collect all the data we wanted and got our phone API working, we finished off our website design. With out Website design complete, we now fully finished integration of the Data Base and implemented it with our website.

Challenges I ran into

Initially we tried to have our phone conversations recorded and executed over Amazon Connect. Due to us having no previous experience of AWS, this turned out to be a very time consuming challenge and took up nearly an entire day in itself before we decided to go with a different solution.

We had never worked with any phone API’s beforehand so it took us some time to understand all the concepts. I had no previous experience in html5 & node.js so a lot of time was spent on getting me up to speed and crash coursing me in the field before I could start contributing.

We initially planned to include transcription functionality however, this turned out to not be doable as Twilio does not support transcription for German audio.

We also ran into some conceptual designs of the limitations of our tool and how it would be used. For one we became concerned with the legality of it due to the data collection and recording of phone calls that would be necessary to make the tool work. We also became concerned about how users would use the tool, as this could potentially provide a source of danger to elderly people if the volunteers would not follow strict hygiene protocols.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Teaching one of our developers the basics of Java script and html5 in this short time.

As we were only a 2 developer team, we are very happy with the progress that we were able to make.

How quickly we were able to progress once we decided to move away from AWS Connect and started using Twilio.

What I learned

Finish the option to request help over the web page as we were not able to implement this in time.

Implementing a mailing system such as nodemailer or leveraging mailgun to ensure CYBERCARE's scalability.

Besides one of our developers having to learn all the tools necessary to make CYBERCARE from scratch, we are particularly happy with having learned the Twilio API.

What's next for 1_010_d_analogeunterstützung_CYBERCARE

Next up we would like to find a solution as to not only connecting helpers with help seekers in the same postcode but also include neighboring ones.

We would like to find a solution as to how to transcribe the phone calls as we think it would make the connection between helpers and help seekers easier since they have quicker overlook over problems.

We would like to add the functionality of having the your current postcode shine up on the Germany map and have a color representation of the amount of request the postcodes near me have at moment.

Introducing systems to prevent malicious activists from abusing the system e.g. abusing the visible phone numbers.

Develop a system that ensures that phone numbers of help seekers are not available to the public but only to an volunteer that has committed to help.

Check regulations and laws to make sure we comply with EU Data laws and are able to protect the data of agents on the website.

Enable more categories when calling for help, i.e. this could be done by specific numbers for dedicated tasks such as asking for help with groceries, with chores or other categories.

Think about how we can spread the word. We could try and contact grocery chains asking them to display our hotline numbers. This is needed since we want to be available to an age group which is not easily reachable over social media.

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