Insight

Safety first, safety fast. Help keep yourself and others safe and informed with Insight.

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About us

Our experience is a testament to the fact that when women come together with a shared vision, incredible things happen. We invite you to explore our platform—a manifestation of our dedication to making the world not just smarter, safer, and greener, but also more inclusive and vibrant.

So, what is Insight?

Safety first, safety fast. Insight is an anti-texting-and-driving and crash detection safety app powered by the INRIX. With this app, the user can enter the contact information of their parents/guardians, relatives, or even friends so that when the user is in dangerous situations such as texting and driving, reckless driving, or even an accident, these user’s designated contacts would be notified. The user can enter their desired location and the app will enter a “lockdown mode,” where they are unable to exit out of the app. In case the user exits the app, then it will notify the person in their contact information that they are on their phone while driving, which will push the user to hold themselves accountable. The app provides an interactive map with crash/safety information for navigation without having to exit the app. This allows the user to be in a safer, more focused environment with minimal distractions.

What was the inspiration for Insight?

We were inspired by an app called Flora, which is a productivity app that allows users to study without looking at their phones by implementing a reward system. If the user is able to study for a recorded duration without using their smartphones, then they have successfully “planted” a virtual tree. If not, then their progress would reset and the tree would die. We wanted to implement an app with Flora’s accountability system in mind, which would allow users to drive in a safer environment with little to no distractions.

How did this all come together?

After lots of planning, we started working on Insight by prototyping the UI on Figma. Afterwards, we built using React Native with Expo as the frontend framework. Meanwhile, the backend of our app was built using Python and Flask. We also implemented APIs such as INRIX’s Incidents API to alert the user of any nearby safety concerns, the Segment Speed API along with Expo sensors to detect if the user is driving over the average speed, and the Vanage API to send messages to those whose contact information was stored if the user tries closing out of the app or drives too fast. To tie it all together, we were able to save user data and saved contacts into a Firebase cloud database.

What were some challenges you faced?

Going in, we wanted to challenge ourselves to explore new frameworks despite most of our team having very limited experience with Flask and React, so part of the hackathon was spent researching steps to implement the different features we needed, trying to troubleshoot installation and unfamiliar code, and learning how the different aspects interacted with each other. In particular, our main issue was merging the frontend and backend into one cohesive project since we were using numerous platforms and tools, but in the end, we were able to create a product we were not only satisfied with, but proud of.

What are some accomplishments you’re proud of?

We’re super proud of how Insight was able to come together as one amazing, impactful project. Coming into this hackathon, a lot of us had little to no experience in React Native and Flask. Persisting through 24 hours of digging through framework documentation, last-minute software downloads, and late-night debugging, we were able to learn so much through this year’s INRIX Hack. We were not only able to learn, but have fun and work together as a collaborative, supportive team.

What did you learn?

We all learned something new, whether it was how to insert a shape on Figma, connecting backend features in Flask to our frontend, or making an entire GUI from scratch in React Native. Either way, we’re confident to say that we’ve all learned at least one skill from the ground-up during this hackathon.

What’s next?

In the future, we hope to expand our app by implementing a reward system to add additional incentive for users to use our app, adding more complex algorithms to the routing to select the most eco-friendly or safest route, and implementing additional navigation features since that would be the main reason users may want to leave the app. We hope that Insight is able to save lives and bring a better sense of safety to those around us and around the world.

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