Favorly

Supporting Elders One Favor at a Time

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Inspiration

Despite the fact that our team is from various countries, we all came together with the same problem: elderly hate crimes. In a society where the main focus lies on the younger generation, we often overlook the problems impacting the older generation. Since the COVID-19 pandemic has begun, anti-Elderly hate crimes in the USA has risen by a shocking 850%. As we approach March, a notice in anti-Asian elderly hate crimes has spurred, specifically in the Bay Area and across America. 11+ people older than 70 were assaulted and 3 of them killed just in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As software developers, we created Favorly, a platform for supporting our elders efficiently through connecting “favorable helpers." With this, Favorly brings down the stress and anxiety of elderly people.

What it does

Favorly aims to solve all problems that occur within elderly people’s daily lives such as carrying groceries or driving them to a local airport. The users, including both the elders and supporters, are allowed to either request a favor or give a favor. The elders are able to request a favor with a deadline, title, description, and image. In doing so, other users who are possible to give a favor are allowed to message the requester directly through a message function or accepting the request.

Once the helper clicks that they have finished the task, the elder receives an email that the task has been finished. Due to Firebase, tasks sync in real-time with all users from around the world. Favorly creates a community that bonds the younger and older generation.

How we built it

Prior to every step of our creation, we started brainstorming on how we can encourage the users through a business perspective. Also, we had to research the current market to determine whether the functions of Favorly can effectively help the elderly people. We used Visual Studio Code extensions to collaborate virtually via a React.js-Firebase web app. Firebase and its corresponding database in Firestore contains authentication features to facilitate the process of signing up and posting favors.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenges that our team ran into was the difference in time zones and collaborating through a virtual environment. Since we had to overcome the time zone difference, which was about 15~17 hours max among team members, we had to frequently stay up until midnight in order to communicate with each other constantly and smoothly.

Jumping around from Twilio and various SMS and emailing APIs, we decided on Email.js. Our two back-end developers had issues understanding and incorporating Email.js. Almost three hours later, our team pushed through, and notifications can be sent to the desired user. Also, even though we had a limited amount of collaboration time--12 hours--, we were able to implement our maximum potential to Favorably.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Beyond the focus on such hackathons, we are impressed by the fact that we successfully completed a project that can change our entire world. We were able to acknowledge societal problems regarding the disregard for the elderly occurring around countries through researching deeply about this project. We are proud of each other that we were able to overcome the virtual environment and build up a meaningful project.

What's next for Favorly

Besides offering an opportunity to help elderly people through Favorly, we hope that it will encourage real younger generation users around the world in the future. Favorly’s features have a high potential of solving the problems within elders' lives, which can eventually expand to related areas involving other minorities. We are highly eager to improve the features of Favorly in order to maximize its potential as a helper and beta test soon!

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