The Story behind Heroes
It all began with Leyda. It was Halloween, and she was on the way to a party. Suddenly the car she was driving got hit by a car. Even thou 911 was called several times, the ambulance didn't make it on time. She lost a lot of blood and she died in the accident. Leyda was my grandmother and I was in the accident too.
Like it happened to my grandmother every minute (60 Seconds) in Latin America 23 people die because in 50% of the cases ambulances (Yale Heart Study 2012) don't make it on time. We believe that the solution is to use the people that is around, because these people will get faster to the victim than any ambulance.
This is why we created Heroes. We know that today we don't need to have superpowers anymore to be a Hero. We can create every day Heroes, and promote empathy by connecting people who needs help with people who have the resources or skills to help them and are near. The help can range as small like needing an iphone charger to as big as needing First Aid.
Complete Demo: http://youtu.be/WiUGk9j8oQY
There is not a bigger happiness that what you get when you help others. This is not just because of the feeling you get. These are research studies that demonstrate how helping others make others very happy:
1) Here is a research made by Michael Steger at the University of Louisville in Kentucky with undergraduate students, that demonstrates that doing good things for others make people happier: http://www.livescience.com/4443-study-good-feel-good.html
2) Another research study: "showed that people suffering from sclerosis were able to ameliorate their condition simply by helping others that had the same condition":http://www.newinki.com/how-to-be-happier/
3) Another source states that "those who demonstrate more altruistic social interest tend to enjoy higher levels of mental health, above and beyond the practical benefits of receiving help and other known psycho spiritual, stress, and demographic factors that you would expect": http://stress.about.com/od/positiveattitude/qt/helping.htm
4) For last and not least, this video demonstrate how helping others bring happiness to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcruIov45bI
Target Users:
The users will be students in universities, neighbours in neighbourhoods and coworkers in working spaces. In general people in communities. We will start in universities, with students.
Features:
Heroes App allows the user to crowdsource any kind of help.
The help can be requested in the request menu, where you specify what you need, why you need it, you can upload a picture and indicate whether is an emergency or not. In Heroes the emergency posts will always appear on top and will blink in red so they can be found easily.
Also Heroes has a panic button, in case of emergencies that can be accessed without opening the app.
Another feature is that Heroes matches the help needed according to the resources and skills the Heroes have in their profile.
Heroes works without internet connection too. We want to allow the user to connect with others no matter the situation. We call this functionality Disaster Mode.
Likewise, our app uses big data to evaluate communities and see how prepared they are for emergency situations and gives tips and advice in how they can improve their resilience. This advice range from learning a new skill like CPR to adding resources to your profile.
For last, Heroes is connected to any wearable device, in order to access faster the Panic Button.
Test App:
The link to download and test the app was sent to the email provided for the test flight.
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