Campus Safety

When in an emergency on a college campus, 63% to 90% of emergency callers cannot properly report their location.

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When in an emergency on a college campus, 63% to 90% of emergency callers don’t know how to describe their location, can’t do it fast enough, and report their location incorrectly.

We wanted to use software to eliminate this problem entirely, not only for NIU but also for any other college, enterprise, or large event. Problems being solved:

  • Increases location accuracy
  • Provides easy contact with authorities
  • Informs users about code of conduct
  • Increases student involvement in campus safety
  • Aids the Huskie Patrol and campus police

Our app would ensure that there’s always an easier way to report incidents; that more incidents will reported; that more students stay safe.

We wanted a streamlined experience, a fluid User interface, and a robust backend system that would work every time without question, without inconsistencies.

One critical design challenge was balancing functionality and versatility with a smooth user interface. When clients are in stressful situations, the last thing they’d want to do is navigate through a cluttered interface.

Our Emergency alert system has a clean front end, a database functioning as it’s backend that holds complaint logs, and an AdminUI interface specifically for security teams to see new incident reports and their locations on campus.

Frontend

  • Open app, grabs location and sends when form submits.
  • Gives options for severity of incident, options for describing incident in words or with given dropdown menu.
  • Ability to contact huskie patrol right directly through website
  • Emergency option that dials 911 (after confirmation) and auto-sends location to security backend.
  • Footer contains important phone numbers and email for campus security in case you need to get into direct contact with them
  • Provides easy access to Student Code of Conduct with hyperlinks to official NIU Student code of conduct page

Backend

  • Database logs every new incident report, all it’s entered data, along with location information to database
  • Every new incident report is logged in a file along with the location information
  • AdminUI for administrators / security teams to easily and cleanly view threats / incidents and their respective locations
  • AdminUI accesses database and displays recent reports, their locations via clicking on them with the built in map, and a log of all previous incident reports.

Outro

This hack motivated us to continue this project later. We will integrate a picture upload system into the webpage, along with building the website into a mobile application for iOS and the Google Play Store.

We plan on continuing the reusability aspect of this web app, even when it is integrated into a mobile app For a safer campus community, go with NIU Campus Safety! Thank you!

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