Drive Safe

Inspiration

Our app is inspired by many accidents that occur because of texting and driving. It is dedicated to the people who die or injured annually because of phone-related accidents.

What it does

Our goal is to prevent any distractions due to phone usage by combining many different apps that are created for safe driving. Many people get distracted by the texts or notifications they receive and get into accidents because of those distractions. Our app, "Drive Safe", will send the response “I am driving right now, I will respond later.” automatically to any notification the driver’s phone receives. It will let the driver know whenever they go significantly over the speeding limit. This will be achieved by projecting a loud, annoying sound that won’t stop until the car is driven in accordance to the speeding limit.

How we built it

The app was built using XCode, an integrated development environment (IDE) used to make apps for iOS devices. It uses Swift 3 as its base code. So far we have built a basic user interface which sends out a custom-made text to contacts. We have created a driver mode, that defers notifications from certain apps, and sends out the customized text.

Challenges we ran into

Before using XCode, we used MIT App Inventor, which was slow, very complicated and much harder to understand. In order to use MIT App Inventor, we had to use an Android device, which none of us owned, so we borrowed an Android phone. Midway, we learnt about XCode in a workshop. We found out that it provided the same resources as MIT App Inventor, but was much more user friendly. In the end, we decided to use XCode to program our app. Some other challenges that we ran into included debugging of the interface and initial understanding Swift.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Since this is our first app, we are very proud of what we have done together so far. The struggles through which we have progressed has given us the opportunity to learn and reflect on everything that has happened thus far, inspiring us to continue with our app and explore further deep into coding.

What we learned

At this hackathon, we have learnt about MIT App Inventor, Make School, ID Tech, Swift, XCode, and other useful software, through workshops. We also learned how to work with the unknown, under pressure and time constraints.

What's next for Drive Safe

In the next two months, we plan to complete our app. Our main goals include speed detection, sending out alerts, customized texts to specific contacts, incorporating teen and adult modes, and location sensors. We also hope to submit the final result to the App Store and Technovation.