Discreetly

In an emergency, our app contacts help through a button, voice, motion, or vital signs, sharing your location and current health data with your loved ones via an AI assistant acting on your behalf.

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Inspiration

2 in every 3 women identified walking alone at time as their primary safety fear. Another study found every other woman has experienced a situation where they couldn't even reach their phone to contact help.

Everyone on the Discreetly team has been around someone who felt unsafe walking alone at night, even on a university campus. One of us received a panicked phone call last week from a friend feeling unsafe. From simply staying on the phone or picking someone up late at night, we've all shared these experiences. Our inspiration for Discreetly comes from wanting to create an app that allows our loved ones to feel safe and always connected, even when we're not nearby.

What it does

Safety when you need it most - without reaching for your phone. Discreetly is designed for moments when taking out your phone simply isn't an option. Whether your hands are occupied, your phone is out of reach, or discretion is essential, our app connects you with help through intelligent actions and multiple response options.

Triggers

  1. Action Button - When your phone is in your pocket and you're being followed at night or in an uncomfortable rideshare, a simple press activates emergency protocols.
  2. Voice Command - If your hands are tied and your phone isn't close by, a custom trigger word activates help hands-free.
  3. Movement Detection - Whether you're being chased, experiencing an abduction attempt, or take a sudden fall while jogging, Discreetly recognizes erratic movement patterns and automatically triggers an alert.
  4. Timed Delay - Walking through an unfamiliar area? Set a countdown when entering uncertain situations. If you don't check in before time runs out, help is automatically summoned.
  5. Breathing Monitor- When paired with Apple Watch, the app detects abnormal breathing from panic attacks, asthma episodes, or physical assault - responding when you can't.
  6. Heart Rate Monitor- Apple Watch integration monitors for heart attacks, severe allergic reactions, and other medical crises when you're alone and unable to call for help.

Discreetly also has four different avenues for finding help. Actions

  1. Distress Call - A voice AI agent instantly calls your chosen contact with your live updating location, heart and respiratory rate, acceleration, and several other things. The AI agent relays critical information and helps coordinate the most knowledgeable, accurate, and fastest response on your behalf. Your AI has access to an emergency contact list, network status, and audio & video feeds, as well as your vitals.
  2. Text Message- Sends a discrete message with your location and relevant sensor readings to your emergency contact.
  3. Ask Gemini AI- Get immediate guidance from Gemini AI when you need fast answers in critical situations.
  4. Covert Call - Establishes a live one-way call with your trusted contact while your phone appears inactive.

Discreetly: Help is always within reach, even when your phone isn't.

How we built it

The Discreetly app is built with Swift. Our calling system works through Twilio for calling and ElevenLabs for the AI response agent. Our texts go through TextBelt API and we also have integrated Gemini for quick AI responses and location based safety tracker that notifies users when entering potential dangerous neighborhoods. We also include Apple Watch integration. When walking around in dangerous area, the watch app automatically opens, and emergency is always one tap away.

Challenges we ran into

We had a last minute idea pivot from a biotech product to Discreetly this morning. We were pretty deadset on the biotech product beforehand and had even bought hardware parts for the Hackathon. However, after much discussion we realized that Discreetly was something that we felt more passionate building. This was a major challenge for us as we had to switch on the fly and rethink our approach and design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of making a robust and nice looking app with time for extensive bug fixing. This has been the first hackathon where we managed our time well and had comfortable leeway to develop features we were interested in. We're also proud of creating effective and reliable call and text with an AI agent that can respond on call.

What we learned

We learned how to use Swift and tried out Xcode for the first time. This was also our first time experimenting with AI phone calls and texts.

What's next for Discreetly

We're hoping to take Discreetly to the next level and really flesh it out as a product. There's still many features that we want to implement and improvements that we just didn't have time to do during a hackathon. In the future we want to make Discreetly a real business with real life impact on people in our community. We envision Discreetly becoming the standard personal safety tool that gives people confidence in any situation.

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