CrimeScope

Inspiration

Currently, the news includes more and more violent issues. As a team, we wanted to help limit this issue of increasingly high crime, beginning in our community of Charlotte. From there, we hope to continue to develop our app and make it accessible not just for this city but cities across the US as well.

What it does

CrimeScope allows users to monitor police activity or suspected criminal activity locally. Users are notified whenever a new incident takes place in their area. The app also includes a feature for users to report suspicious behavior in their area and create a community space within the app.

How we built it

We built CrimeScope using the platform Thunkable, which allowed us to effectively create the functions and user interface for the app without needing too much experience. The format of the platform and the block coding made it easy to collaborate with other team members.

Challenges we ran into

For the app focus, we initially wanted to create an app that incorporates AI in the design to solve this issue. However, we realized that training an AI would be too complicated and time-draining for this type of issue, so we decided to create a crime monitoring app instead for efficiency and overall effectiveness.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We feel that our app design is very effective because it is clear and not too cluttered. We aimed for a minimalistic design in order to increase user comprehensibility of the function of the app. In addition, our system in which users can post recent crime activity is simple and convenient to use, making the functionality of the app that much better.

What we learned

We learned how to work as a team, since in the beginning our team members disagreed on what problem we should tackle in the community and how we would go about doing it. We also developed skills in time management, and making an app both aesthetically pleasing and effectively functioning.

What's next for CrimeScope

As all cities experience crime, we want to make CrimeScope accessible and effective to combat crime anywhere across the state and even the country. We want to also make sure this technology is more accessible to people of all ages and physical abilities, with text-to-speech and voice functions.