Be Safe!

An emergency response android app that aims at making the world a safer place to live.

Comment

Inspiration

With the increase in recent crime incidents in and around my living place, I wanted to do something to help people be safe. Though there are enough help available from police and campus securities, usually they fail to identify an attack on the pedestrian merely because of no communication. This prompted me to build an application that needs minimal user interference to widely communicate an emergency.

What it does

The app works on the output of accelerometer that is integrated in every phone. Initially, when we install the app, we need to update the emergency contact numbers. Later, whenever there is an emergency, one just needs to shake the phone. The shake sensors detect the movement of the phone and activate the following things -

  1. Reads GPS location of the user
  2. Sends text messages to emergency contacts stating there is an emergency in a particular location.
  3. Sends a post request to the server that the app is subscribed to
  4. Rings a loud alarm/siren to scare the attacker and to attract public attention
  5. Helps tracing the attacker by sending GPS locations continuously

This can as well prevent a false alarm where user explicitly get to stop sending notification within 5 seconds of app activation.

How I built it

I read the shake sensor output for an instant of time. This output triggers the app. This works on a multithreaded module where all tasks including sending sms, posting request and ringing alarm happen simultaneously.

Challenges I ran into

MANY!!! Reading from the shake sensor was the toughest of all. Also making the decision of how to prevent false alarms was a bit tricky.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The app is ready and working. Anyone can start using it right away. Till last night I didn't believe this would happen!

What I learned

Android is powerful. If we know how to leverage its power, we can build awesome applications.

What's next for Be Safe!

Once many users start using the app, I want to integrate it with users network and find other nearest users to call out for help.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates