Volunteer to Help (V2H) Application

Inspiration

Oncology patients like our mom who are immuno-compromised and also elderly people who need help with day-to-day tasks such running errands, dropoffs/pickups and other non-financial help. We were in middle school when our mom was diagnosed with lung and brain cancer, and we've had an opportunity to see the struggles of patients first hand, which inspired us to create an application that would connect volunteers in the community who want to help the patients and elderly. When one hand stops working, the other hand makes up for the lack of lost function. Similarly, we feel in a community, normal, young healthy people want and are ready to help patients and elderly people in their day-to-day, so the needy are not left behind. Our application connects volunteers with people who need help.

What it does

Our application is targeted at old and sick people who need help with running errands, transportation needs, and other non-financial help. The application matches people who need help with volunteers in their area. We started with 11 zip codes in the Mercer county, New Jersey area. There is a lot of essential, non-financial help needed by elderly, immunocompromised, and sick people especially during Covid-19 and snow storms when they are unable to go outside or drive. They need help with day-to-day tasks such as groceries, appointment pick up/drop off, medication pickup, mowing the lawn, etc. There are people in the community who are willing and want to volunteer in help in non-financial ways. Our application registers and matches the needy people who are looking for help with volunteers in their area. The application provides a one-stop place for volunteers and people who need help. The volunteers can register their name, phone, and zip code while the people who need help can enter their name, phone, and zip code after which they can search for available help in their area. The application currently only services 10 zip codes (11 if someone willing to help adds a new one) in Mercer county in New Jersey; however, the application allows for volunteers to be added in other zip codes. If a new volunteer adds their information in a new zip code, and someone inquires for help in the newly listed zip code, the application matches the new volunteer.

How we built it

Before programming, we sat for an hour, brainstorming. We settled on this idea and then we decided what the UI would look like on a chalkboard. Kind of like pseudocode. We planned the text and its positioning before we started to code. While programming, we ran into several issues which kept us very late at night (1:30) and woke us bright and early (6:45) today. Luckily, we were able to fix them and we certainly learned a lot.

Challenges we ran into

When someone wants to help enters their own zip code, we couldn't store it inside of the array because it had a fixed value. In order to fix this, we converted it into a list. This worked way better because we didn't need to specify how big the list needed to be. This part of the project was the most mentally challenging because it was very late at night and I woke up today early to finish this. Another big challenge we ran into, was figuring out how we were going to store the zip codes and phone numbers. This took a very long time as well. Making the UI wasn't super challenging but if I had more time, I would make the UI look better and clean up the code (comments, white space, and efficiency).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are twins and freshmen in high school. We run a foundation called beinghumanmatters.org to help cancer patients and their families in their fight against cancer. We also volunteer at the Princeton Medical Center's Merwick Palliative and Hospice care where we get to first hand see the struggles of the very sick and elderly patients. We have partnered with the social worker and financial navigator team at Penn Medicine's Princeton Medical Center for helping patients especially patients with radiation bills which is an unmet medical need.

What we learned

We were in middle school when our mom was diagnosed with lung and brain cancer and the struggles our family went and is going through prompted us to create this application foundation to help patients and the elderly people. Through ours and sick people's struggles we have learned that the rest of us normal healthy people can do more to help the needy people in the community. In terms of what we learned while programming this, we both got more comfortable with Java and we both learned about hashmaps and lists. We also got more familiar with arrays.

What's next for Volunteers2Help (V2H)

We would like to create a mobile application as we have some experience doing so. We want this on a phone because it is more efficient and it helps the community. We might also make this into a website. This is just the start to something much bigger.