LifeShare

Inspiration

Bad Donations When everyone lines up in front of hospitals to send blood to hurricane victims, most of this blood never gets to the victims and expires. However, hospitals need blood periodically throughout normal times, when most people don't donate.

What it does

Good Donations This is a website that allows users to sign up and receive a text whenever hospitals near them run into a lack of blood. It also has Alexa app for portability and accessibility for the users; hospitals also may search if there are any hospitals nearby that have excess blood packets and/or send notifications to users in case of urgent need for blood donations.

How we built it

Languages and APIs We built this using React, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Twilio, and finally the Google-Cloud-Platform. Alexa is built using Node on AWS lambda, uploaded on AWS S3, and is connected with Firebase and Twilio.

Challenges we ran into

Time Constraint We really ran into a problem of lack of coordination at the start. People were working on parts of the project we had already decided weren't necessary. But over time, we came through this and began dividing the work efficiently in order to get the project done on time. Moreover, after finishing off the code for google home mini, we realized NYU wifi is not compatible with google home mini, thus we had to start over with Alexa. Getting modules to connect properly on AWS lambda was also a struggle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Saving Lives We're proud to have completed this project because if enough people sign up, we can make a difference and actually save lives. Smart donations could be the future of donations, and people will live better because of it.

What we learned

Strategy We primarily learned to figure out before starting a project who should work on what, and how we're going to build a project. This is important to prevent meaningless work and quicker progress towards the MVP.

What's next for LifeShare

Real Life Next, we intend on launching LifeShare in the real world, hoping that hospitals will sign up to join us on the quest for smart blood donations.