Alive Hospice Mobile Application

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Choosing a non-profit to work with

We chose Alive Hospice as the non-profit organization to work with because we wanted to help making a mobile application that would assist the organization that provides personal cares for the people with life-threatening illnesses. We are grateful that we are able to use our coding skills to practically help a community-supporting-organization

What it does

Our project is a mobile application in which users can share their personal life stories with Alive Hospice by answering interview questions provided by Alive Hospice. The app includes an easy way to upload video, audio, and photos as answers to prompted questions. In addition, it asks the user to accept/decline a legal release to use materials publicly.

How we built it

First, we designed an UI mockup for the app using Figma. Once we had a basic implementation of the UI, we then moved on to using Unity for frontend development and C# for backend development.

Then, we created all the layout and transitions among pages using the Unity.

We moved onto accessing the camera/microphone from the phone and downloading the files (video or voice recording) to the device so that we could send those files through email to the Alive Hospice.

Finally, we worked on calling the files stored in the device to attach to the email and send the email.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was understanding what the client wanted. We were not sure if they wanted a platform to build communities among patients who were fighting against illnesses or just a platform for users to share their stories with Alive Hospice directly. Because the project idea was in its early stages, we wanted to make sure that our application would provide our client with a platform that best fit their needs. Another big challenge that we ran into was when sending the videos/audios taken by the user to the Alive Hospice center via email. We were not sure if we were to use a Cloud-base upload or the device-download to send the files via email. After hours of research and troubleshooting, we were able to realize that device-download method is a little more faster and easier to handle with a given time-constraint of the competition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although we all met each other the first time, it was surprising to see ourselves communicating with each other efficiently, respecting each other's opinions and ideas, and working hard as a team with divided works. We all learned from each other and put our ideas together for a great cause. This hackathon was also a first for some of our team members, which provided a lot of experience to them. In addition, we are very proud of ourselves to create a simple yet elegant design for our app. Lastly, we are proud that we were able to create everything that the client required us to have in our app before the deadline.

What we learned

For three out of four members of our team, it was their first time creating a mobile app. This was a great experience to be able to try something new. We also learned the basics of Unity for mobile app development and Figma for UI prototyping.

Everyone from our team got to learn about Alive Hospice and the support it gives to people with life-threatening illnesses, further motivating us to utilize our problem-solving and programming skills to support the community and the organizations that build up the community

What's next for Alive Hospice Mobile Application

We hope to continue working on the app through the summer so that we would be able to provide an efficient and easy-to-use app for users to share their stories. With more time given, here are further specific plans for the summer: 1) We plan on utilizing cloud storage and increasing functionality, including file history and isolated file sharing. 2) We plan on making a "log-in" page for the user to log-in to their emails. 3) We plan on making the app capable of sending bigger files via email or other platforms (more than 50 MB), and 4) We plan on making sure that the app is maintainable through more documentations.