Kinder

Inspiration

Our team members have always heard that it is difficult to adopt, but we never truly understood until we did our own research into it. We learned that, on top of the gigantic costs that go into simply beginning the process of finding a child, the process often takes years to complete, and there are roughly over 100 thousand children that are eligible and waiting to be adopted in the US. Upon learning this information, we decided we really wanted to make something that would help the process speed up for both the adults gracious enough to take the time, money, and effort into following the process from beginning to end and the children who are just wanting to finally escape the foster care system - which is often times not a healthy environment - and be placed into a loving home that is the right fit for them.

What it does

People looking to adopt use Kinder to find potential adoptees based on their child preferences (gender, age, ethnicity, etc.) and agency preferences (price, distance). Adoption agencies create Kinder profiles for their children by uploading each child's photo. Kinder then uses the Face API from Azure Cognitive Services to generate a profile of the child that the agency can then edit. Once a parent aggregates a list of potential adoptees, they can directly message the agency in charge of each child to move one step further into the adoption process.

How we built it

To quickly prototype the app, we used Xamarin.Forms along with Azure to create a complete solution. Specifically, we used the Face API from Azure Cognitive Services to make profile creation for children less tedious for the agencies as well as Azure SQL Database as our data back-end;

Challenges we ran into

We didn't sleep much, if not at all, the night before the hackathon, so we were too sleep-deprived to develop as much as we wanted. Technology-wise, there were no challenges that we ran into.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe that Kinder has the potential to have a positive impact in many people's lives; the adoption process in the U.S. is tedious and has extremely low adoption rates. Kinder can help expedite the process for millions parents seeking to find and love a child, as well as increase adoption rates. Even though we didn't finish as much as we would have liked to, we still are proud of the idea and the in-depth research that went into implementing it.