HelperVille

Inspiration

According to the CDC, seniors are at high risk and therefore more likely to remain at home and socially distance themselves. We wanted to create a streamlined web application to aid seniors with their errands and provide an environment for virtual interaction.

What it does

The feature suites of our web app are designed around two focuses, social and service. We envision that this app will be used by local community centers as a platform to post virtual social events where seniors can just explore and join, like book clubs and cooking classes. The service aspect, on the other hand, will be offered by volunteers in the neighborhood where they can help with grocery requests. The key here is to foster a sense of community and bring the neighborhood together to support those in need.

How I built it

We spent most of our time designing the app interface in Figma and the voice control flow in VoiceFlow. We also have a simple voice control demo built in React using the Web Speech API.

Challenges I ran into

Due to the online component it was difficult to get the same environment setup for everyone this hindered all of us from being able to work on the github repo. Also we had some issues learning voiceflow in a short amount of time however we were able to learn and make progress on polishing the interaction design.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were an adaptive team. We met starting Friday night to be able to do the research and gain background knowledge needed to design and build something we care about. It is definitely a challenging idea to implement and even more challenging given the virtual setting, but we manage to communicate and collaborate on Zoom and make meaningful progress.

What I learned

The main skills we learned were communication and collaboration especially with our hackathon being virtual. We had to be mindful of each other's commitments, time zones, and skill rangers and make sure that everyone felt that they were able to have a meaningful contribution.

What's next for HelperVille

We want our web app to integrate with existing social services for seniors from community centers and local government groups after the pandemic ends. This way, seniors have access to reliable and affordable services on one centralized platform regardless of who is providing them. We also want to migrate it to a mobile app as well to target senior users who own a smartphone.