Confidant

Inspiration

A lot of time extra time is spent in trying to determine if a person is in danger.

What it does

Pre-Alerts your emergency contact(s) if you do not reach an expected destination in time, or if your phone is not reachable past a certain deadline.

How we built it

• PubNub DSN for serverless architecture with a custom ArcGIS GeoCoding XHR block
• Nexmo to send SMS alerts to emergency contacts, rather than expect every emergency contact to install the same or a sister tracking app

Challenges we ran into

• Time. There was a lot to do, and a lot we wanted to do that will have to wait

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Getting the multiple components working together so seamlessly

What we learned

• How useful serverless architecture can be

What's next for Confidant

• Collect encrypted data and upon any incident, send it to a trusted contact who has the decryption key and/or law enforcement
• Could be useful to those who fear their lives might be in danger, e.g. victims of domestic abuse, whistleblowers, and journalists under oppressive regimes
• Use ArcGIS with spatial data on how "dangerous" areas can be, e.g. low signal strength, or high crime rates, and automatically start collecting data

Built With

• esri
• nexmo
• pubnub