Connect Generational

Julia and Dorrie Susser engage in a conversation about the 60s through our video platform.
Explore the bios of the elderly individuals in order to find a person to connect with.

Inspiration

My grandmother is now living alone in her apartment. She has told me about feeling frustrated and bored at home and has shared with me how grateful she is for our weekly calls. Indeed, the social isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on all of us, but its effects have been felt the most by America’s nearly 50 million senior citizens. Over 13.8 million seniors live alone in the US, and in 2020, 56% percent of them reported feeling isolated, which can cause depression and medical issues among the elderly. Because of their vulnerability to COVID-19, many of the social connections and stories shared between seniors and America’s youth have been lost.

What it does

We wanted to reignite these social connections by creating an online platform where seniors can engage in face to face conversations and form intergenerational relationships with children and teens. During these troubling times, we hope that our website will be a source of one of a kind knowledge to youth, as well as a place for seniors to feel heard during this isolating pandemic.

How we built it

We built a flask website with the Twilio video chat API. When a new user joins the call, it creates an access token for them and retrieves the other callers to send back to the GUI from the server. We also used HTML for the webpage and CSS for the styling.

Challenges we faced

We struggled with integrating cloud video into our website. We attempted many different strategies such as using WebRTC and Okta but finally settled on using Twilio video chat API (using Twilio's real-time communication SDKs). The Twilio call worked seamlessly into the website allowing us to create many different call rooms for each senior.

Next Steps

The next step in our process is turning this into a fully functioning website. This would include refining the look of the website to increase its clarity as well as a login section and chat function in order for seniors to customize their profiles and seniors to schedule meetings.