Inspiration
We had recently heard about a woman trying to save herself from her abuser by faking a call to a pizza place when it was actually 911. When the police had finally reached the address of the woman they had realized that there had been several previous calls about domestic violence. Unfortunately, not everyone is capable of such actions in traumatizing situations. We felt that people shouldn’t have to go through the hardship of faking a call to the police when they could call friends, neighbors, and then the police in a discrete manner.
What it does
To begin with, the user is told to make their own account so that they can personalize their settings. Then, they are taken to a settings page where they can create a pre-set text message and their emergency contacts. Since domestic violence can be extremely threatening we have provided the user with a “Call 911” button at the bottom of most pages in the app. However, the user has the option to go through a few steps before having to reach out to the police. The first option is to text a few friends that you have set as emergency contacts earlier in the app. We give these people 5 minutes of time to respond. It is possible that certain people are not as responsive through text, therefore after the timer ends, the user is given an alert and taken to the next page. This step allows the user to call their first emergency contact, which could create a better chance of them responding. If this contact cannot be reached, the user is left to contacting 911 so that they can be provided with the protection they need.
How we built it
We used the Ionic framework so that we could use Javascript, HTML, CSS in order to create one application that would work for IOS, Android, and the web. We also made use of the Textbelt REST API, and Ajax/Jquery to send free text messages to anyone, regardless of whether they had the app or not.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest problem was deciding on an idea, since we spent lots of time just trying to decide on an idea. Then, we had a tough time dividing up the tasks of a large amount of work, because different people had many different skill levels of coding. One of the very first problems we encountered was being able to call certain phone numbers while using ionic since it would automatically open the FaceTime app. However, we managed to manipulate the code and make the app access the actual phone app which allowed it to work on both iOS and Android phones. We also had trouble sending a message to another person through the Twilio API as it required us to pay for a phone number. We ended up finding a free REST API that we could make a POST request to in order to send a text message.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite our lack of experience with the Ionic framework, we were able to create a functional application that we think could benefit others.
What we learned
We have learned how teamwork is used to split up large amounts of work, how to cooperate, and how teamwork is almost necessary to make large tasks not seem as daunting. Many of us were beginners to jQuery, so it was a fun experience to learn and use it in our web application. We also learned that the internet has an enormous amount of resources to help us expand our knowledge on simply everything!
What's next for Escape
Creating a better user experience, and also providing location data will be our next big step with Escape.
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