HelpMe

Creating a mobile application that can help the children in assisting their education, caretaker, and wellbeing from the local community members, government/private NGOs around them.

Comment

4 stage process that we followed in Hack the North 2021

(Define - Understand - Analyse - Build)

Define

Inspiration

What is the problem?

As we know, over 1.5 million children's has experienced the death of at least one or both parent during covid-19 all over the world. In the USA, an estimated over 40,000 children lost one or both parents. In India, as estimated over 0.12 million children lost one or both parents. So, children who have lost a parent or caregiver are at a high risk of getting their health affected, their safety, education, and also wellbeing.

Some facts

Secondary research (USA and Indian news website articles) -

1) https://www.aappublications.org/news/2021/04/05/children-losing-parents-covid-040521

2) https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/07/left-behind-15-million-kids-may-have-lost-parent-caregiver-covid-19

3) https://scroll.in/latest/1000716/covid-19-more-than-1-19-lakh-children-in-india-lost-at-least-one-parent-or-grandparent-shows-study

4) https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-over-1-million-children-lost-a-parent-to-covid-including-1-1-lakh-in-india-7414386/

Understand

Who are the users?

User - Children's

Analyse

1) We have analyzed, how our application will look like.

2) Who is going to use the application

3) Impact on the society

4) How many children's life we can safe

5) Our problem is a real one

6) Our solution will help every child who lost their parents

How we build it

Our project was prototyped with Adobe XD and Figma, it was then programmed with React Native. Firebase was used for user authentication, Positionstack API was used for retrieving the user's location data, and CharityNavigator was used for identifying the nearest humanitarian charity.

1) We first brainstorm, about how our application will look like

2) Then we made some low fidelity sketches on a white paper

3) Showing all the sketches to the team members and getting confirmation from the developer team.

4) Making user flow, information architecture, and getting confirmation from the developer team.

5) We then design the high-fidelity screens

6) Done the prototype

7) Given the design file to the developer

8) Developer started coding

Application Name -

HelpMe

Logo Idea -

Shaking Hand (Symbolize - To help each other in difficult times)

Solution -

Creating a mobile application that can help the children in assisting their education, caretaker, and wellbeing from the local community members, government/private NGOs around them. This means an application that enables the local community and NGOs to give a normal childhood life to children who lost their parents in covid-19. That can provide long-term support on education, health, wellbeing, safety, etc.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we faced was time. Our project was overly ambitious, we originally planned to provide the option for users to provide donations to the NGOs. There were also many features that we would have liked to implement but simply lacked the time, including Facebook and Email logins, as well as multi-platform support for connecting with NGOs (rather than just through phone) as well as contacting the NGOs by sending an email with the user's situation directly from the app

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We have accomplished the solution, design, and main part of doing coding properly.

What we learned

Building an app is difficult and cannot be accomplished in two days. In order to make a good application, there are many factors that one must consider including: error handling, designing a pleasant user experience, fluid screen transitions, etc. Two of our members actually came from native Android development using Java/Kotlin, transitioning into react-native within such a short amount of time was not easy. We were not only learning a new programming language, it was also a whole new framework to adapt to. It was a memorable experience that taught us a lot about the framework itself, as well as the pros and cons of mobile app development on each framework.

What's next for HelpMe

The next steps for HelpMe are to partner with NGOs to decrease response times and to improve user experience. Additionally, we plan on implementing the donation system as well. Lastly, since we've chosen a cross-platform framework to create HelpMe, the support of the IOS operating system would be a major goal as well

Contact -

anthonymatthewtieu@gmail.com

Phone Number -

+1 647 573 6101

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