Emergency Rescue

Inspiration

As Hampton University students, we recently learned through Hurricane Florence what it is like being put in a situation in which we have to evacuate in the middle of what we thought would be a normal week of school. We witnessed classmates panic to make last minute arrangements, from expensive flights to their homes across the country, to planning carpool rides with friends, and calling parents. We also watched some students who had no option but to stay on campus during what luckily turned out to only be tropical storms in the area. This got us thinking about the many other affected individuals outside of our school community that did not even get the worst of it.

After this experience, we wanted to develop a crowdsourcing evacuation app that would make dangerous situations far more easy for communities to endure. This prototype we have built is called Emergency Rescue.

What it does

Much like Uber, Emergency Rescue connects drivers to people in need of a ride. However, this is a more voluntary process. Drivers can fill out their personal information through our mobile app such as name, phone number, and number of available seats in his or her vehicle, and the individuals in need of evacuation can fill out similar information including the amount of seats a possible group they have will fill. Emergency Rescue will connect people to the closest drivers with the adequate amount of seats.

How we built it

We implemented our ideas through OutSystems to design the mobile app, using dependencies such as Google Maps Mobile and the Location plug-in.

Challenges we ran into

The development of Emergency Rescue was our first ever time using the IDE, OutSystems. Being used to coding more, this was a steep adjustment for all of our team members.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have learned to use new software in OutSystems, and would like to use it for future work we do.

What we learned

We learned how to make use of OutSystems. We spent a majority of time learning it for ourselves, and feel confident in using it more effectively for future projects and hackathons.

What's next for Emergency Rescue

We want to fully implement all the ideas we had for Emergency Rescue, an idea we are definitely proud of. With what we learned from here, we believe we can accomplish that very soon.

Built With

• outsystem