Bloodhound

Dynamic planning of blood donation locations to tackle emergencies and blood shortages in the wake of Covid-19.

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Introducing Project Bloodhound 🚀

For the best demo cut see our Loom Bloodhound header

✨ Inspiration

The COVID‐19 pandemic has impacted blood donations and is causing disruption to both the supply and demand for blood, especially for rare blood types. Large interruptions to donation activity could have dire consequences and should be avoided by ensuring the supply and demand are monitored and managed carefully.

This is where Bloodhound comes to help find your donors, ease their donation journey and make sure that you, the donation centres, are in contact and aware of what donors are available and can reach them easily.

🛠️ How we built it

  • With lots of blood, sweat and tears
  • We started with brainstorming, bouncing ideas on what we could build and decided to focus on tech for social good and the topic of blood donation shortages during the pandemic was really interesting
  • We then discussed the pain points, did research into what the needs and blockers for the donation process are, and who would be our main user groups (eg donors, companies requesting mobile blood drives, donation centres)
  • Then we moved onto wireframing and prototyping in Figma, which was great to help us get onto the same page with what the vision and visual representation of the solution will be (this is also when our 4th team member threw in the towel )
  • We then created our visual identity and brand, including logo and color pallette
  • Then we went to the workshop on React. That's when wedecided to use React and the Material UI design framework for building our solution along with GitHub repl.it, as this combination would allow us to pair program easily and also be able to setup a project and be ready to go in minutes.
  • The bulk of our time was then spent on building the web app, customizing the Material UI theme to fit our branding, along with the Google Maps API integration for the display of available donors being the most challenging part

🏥 What it does

Bloodhound is a web application that allows donors, companies and donation centres manage the availability and frequency of mobile blood drives in the areas where they have the most demand. This comes to help understand key needs and motivation to donate (or not donate) during thimes of crisis.

🚧 Challenges we ran into

  • Getting familiar with React, as we had limited experience as a team with the framework
  • The Google Maps API integration and displaying the available donors on the map
  • Had one of our team members resign as they didn't feel they had enough experience to get involved

💟 Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Getting the map page to work
  • Creating an end to end solution with visual idenity and brand
  • Having fun building it together

📕 What we learned

  • React
  • Collaborating through Discord and repl.it
  • Google Maps APIs aren't well documented
  • Scotland is an awesome place to live

▶️ What's next for Bloodhound

  • We would love to work more on actually implementing an authentication mechanism, expaninding the filtering and analytics features of the donor map as well as create a more engaging and comprehensive profile and page for the donors and companies.
  • ✨Magic ✨

🏆 Tracks we would love to be considered for

  • \Tech - Backslash Build
  • \Design - Backslash Build
  • CIVICA - Tech for Good
  • Most Impressive

🎪 Although we thought we could have a good shot at "Most Entertaining", we realised that being funny doesn't mean the solution is fun! Hope you enjoyed our hack 🔥

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