HumanChain

An interface to bridge the gap between people in need & volunteers during the time of this pandemic

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Inspiration

Our world turned upside down with the outbreak. With the ever-growing numbers, essential services have come to a stop, the everyday routine is constricted to with people being forced to go into lockdown. In such a scenario, panic is profound and ubiquitous. Procuring daily supplies is becoming increasingly nightmarish and homebound patients who need assistance are helpless. Though people have been asking help through varied platforms and some have also offered help, there is an absence of a universal stop which serves all needs. HumanChain is a solution towards connecting the people in need and the people willing to help, hence forming a human chain to overcome this pandemic.

What it does

HumanChain is an interface that bridges the gap and brings together these people as it suggests, builds a human chain for providing help for those in need, to fight this pandemic.

We have incorporated the following features into this application for a seamless UI/UX:

Need Assistance?

Enter personal details along with some details of the requirement. Assistance is offered under three categories,

  1. Medicines [After uploading prescription to IPFS]
  2. Physical Assistance
  3. Daily Essentials [groceries, milk, etc.]

While requesting for medicines or daily essentials, the person would have to pay the price of the products to the volunteer in cash.

Volunteer

One can enlist to volunteer for those in need. The page showcases details of people who need help and the type of help required.

For medicines, volunteers could view the prescription uploaded to IPFS for the authenticity of the request.

Donate

The platform allows individuals to offer donations both in cash and kind to combat the pandemic.

Financial donations could be made for the causes listed. We have provided an interface for donations via cryptocurrency (ETH) as well as by Card [A test payment gateway has been included].

The feature of donation in kind allows one can upload supplies the person can donate for those in need. Includes groceries, sanitation products, etc.

News

This page shows COVID related news from all over the world along with a live counter of the number of people affected by it in a country-wise tally.

How we built it

  • Developed the frontend completely using HTML5/CSS3 (with Bootstrap) & vanilla-Javascript
  • Used Google Firebase as our database for storing details about users, donations (both cash & kind), required assistance & volunteers
  • All features (except news) can be accessed only after the user has logged in
  • While requesting assistance, in case of medicines, we request the user to upload the relevant prescription, which is stored on IPFS to be viewed later by the volunteer
  • Financial donations are linked to the blockchain (Ethereum) for transparency & decentralization. For this Proof of Concept, we spin up a local Ethereum Node (using ganache-cli) & deploy the smart contracts using truffle. We also start an express local server that directs requests from the application to the Ethereum node.
  • We also allow donations via Card (we used checkout.js to implement the test payment gateway)
  • In-Kind donations can be viewed & their location is tracked using Google Maps
  • For the global news, we used NewsAPI & for the tally of country-wise COVID-19 cases, we used the NovelCOVID API

Challenges we ran into

  1. Issues with versions of web3.js
  2. Integration of the frontend with firebase & ethereum
  3. Finding the suitable framework amongst new frameworks like DappHero, Glitch & Webflow (we tried that initially, but later stuck to vanilla HTML, CSS & JS)

What's next for HumanChain

  1. Make the Login/Signup more robust & secure
  2. Integrate medicine and grocery request services with google maps so that the nearest store having stock can respond
  3. Design an Admin portal for government officials or other NGOs to create a Cause for raising funds through charity
  4. Currently, the donation via Credit/Debit Card is just for testing purposes. We intend to integrate the payment gateway robustly in the future using checkout.js
  5. Prioritize the allocation of resources to a particular cause on the basis of urgency rather than first come first serve basis
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