Inspiration
We were inspired by individuals in our families that have disabilities, as well as by others who we do not know personally, but who face similar challenges such as finding it difficult to get the help/assistance they need. Another thing that inspired us was the fact that many individuals who have disabilities also find it difficult to make friends or just find other people to connect with, who have similar (or different) life experiences.
What it does
Our website acts as a place where users can find services best suited for their disability. Users of any age will be able to use our website and its AI chatbot feature to ask for assistance or use the conventional dropdowns for help. One important part of our website are all the actual profiles of caregivers and drivers, which is incorporated into the website as its own dropdown. Another aspect of our website is the CareGiverConnect Community Center. This is a physical building located in Bellevue that acts as a community gathering place for our website members. Users can attend weekly classes hosted at the CC to meet others and form a community centered around inclusivity and belonging.
How we built it
To build our website, we primarily used HTML as our coding language. Implementation detailes for features are listed below:
We created a Google Doc that had an outline of all the features we wanted to implement in our website and we used this document as a to-do list for our website.
For the caregiver and driver profiles, we created fake profiles by manually generating fake work phone numbers and emails for each one of our caregivers.
After group discussions, we came to the conclusion that we needed to also implement a feature that allows users to submit feedback to our website that can allow us to improve the overall user experience. But, this also gives customers the opportunity to submit complaints about certain activities that could pose potential threats. This was done using a Google Forms survey that was hyperlinked into the final website.
For the AI chatbot, we first wrote pseudocode that checked the user input for specific keywords (which were defined in the document mentioned earlier), and if these keywords were found, appropriate results will be outputted. But, if the user input is not specific enough, the AI chatbot will prompt the user for some more information so that reliable and applicable information can be shown.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the end product. The entire team felt that this project can truly help those with disabilities and even if they do not need any specific type of assistance, they can still use our website to find others to connect with and form relations.
What we learned
Throughout the development process of the project, we learnt a lot about both product development, but also thinking of the product from a user's perspective. All our group members have taken a class at UWB about software engineering where we learn about user stories and requirement engineering, so we found ourselves implementing those techniques into the development of our project. For example, we created user-stories (this was done informally, so we simply verbally talked about them) to determine how users would use the website, which then helped us come up with a list of features for the final product.
What's next for CareGiverConnect
For future steps, we would love to polish our website to enhance the user-experience.
We would start by making the AI chatbot more natural, where users can have a conversation with it, just like ChatGPT and other AI platforms.
The list of disabilities along with caregiver and driver profiles on the website are very limited, so we would add more to make this list inclusive of other sorts of disabilities and caregivers that specialize in those types of disabilities and care-giving.
Including the correct image on our homescreen and images for the caregiver and driver profiles (using stock images).
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