I'll Be Back

I'll Be Back allows people to securely share their location with others they trust. In case of any anomalies in the journey, I'll Be Back notifies trustees if something suspicious have happened.

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Inspiration

As students in a busy city, safety is our topmost concern. We need to stay connected, so that in case of an emergency, others can quickly find out about it and take action. However, existing tools do not offer the right features and are not convenient to use. As such, we wanted to build a solution that would allow students to easily share their location with the people they trust, in case of an emergency. This way, another person can have all the necessary information to notify the authorities, try to find and help their trustees.

What it does

I'll Be Back allows students to say "I'm going [there], and keep [my trusted friend] up to date just in case." The walker would enter a trusted person's name and phone number, and also add where they're going, when they are coming back, and a short message. The trusted person will get an SMS notification that their friend is going out, to stay alert in case an emergency comes up. If something happens, the walker can alert the trustee with a single click and send their I'll Be Back app URL via message. Additionally, I'll Be Back watches for anomalies such as phone shutting off or walker taking too long and notifying the trustee. The trustee would see where their friend was going to and from, and what their last synced location was.

How we built it

I'll Be Back is a reactive web app with React on the front end, and NodeJS and Express on the back end. We used Socket.io to efficiently sync the walker's location with our server. The whole website is hosted on Google Cloud and uses a Domain.com domain: illbeback.tech. For all notifications to the trustee, we use Twilio.

Challenges we ran into

  • Managing the deadline - we had to pivot a few times until we had a direct vision of the app we wanted to build. Unfortunately, we had to cut some of the features we envisioned, such as smart anomaly detection, to finish the app on time.
  • Working on one project in a group - as a beginner hackathon team, we had to efficiently distribute work that would best fit our strengths. While working together was a lot of fun, we had to quickly resolve code merge conflicts, and help each other in case of major issues.
  • Picking best ideas - deciding together what features we could potentially implement in such a short period.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Successfully finishing, integrating, and demoing the end-to-end product.
  • Integrating Google Maps API to push, fetch and display walker location.
  • Using Twilio for efficient, SMS trustee notifications.
  • Figuring out how to run a GCP server and linking our illbeback.tech domain.
  • Resolving some nerve-wracking bugs in the middle of the night :)

What we learned

  • How to setup GCP
  • How to use the Twilio API
  • How to integrate Google Maps with our website
  • How to configure website routing

What's next for I'll Be Back

  • Collaborating with the campus police so that walkers can notify them immediately of their location in case of an emergency, improving on the existing Cal BearWalks.
  • Persistent storage to store the accounts of trusted friends, common destinations, etc.
  • Machine learning-based anomaly detection during the journeys would intelligently detect potential safety threats to the walkers.

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