WeMove

Never Walk Alone Again

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Inspiration

We, as women, are often told to never travel alone at night. While it is unfortunate that we live in a society where it is not normal for women to feel safe, it is most certainly a reality: statistics from the Washington Post show that as of 2012, women were more than twice as likely as men to say they were afraid to walk in their neighborhoods at night alone. Our app, WeMove, hopes to provide a free service that allows women to feel safer traveling at night by pairing women with other women who are leaving and heading to approximately the same location.

Two use cases for this product include students walking back to their dorms after a college party and women walking from work to a subway or bus stop a few blocks away. In each case, if the female were placed in a darker environment or a less safe area, they would feel uncomfortable walking alone. However, due to the short distance of the walk, these people might not want to pay for a Lyft or Uber. WeMove bridges the gap for users who want to move across shorter distances safely.

What it does

When the user opens the app, they can either create a new account or log in. Then, they can create a profile and sign up for a walk. After they enter their start and end location, they are matched with another person with a similar start and end destination so they can make the walk together.

How we built it

We used the AppleMaps API and Xcode to build the map screen. We used Node.js, Javascript, and HTML to build a server that works on pairing people. We used Python and PostgreSQL to build a database, which was then connected to Microsoft Azure's ComputerVision API, which we used to scan the ID's.

Challenges we ran into

-We had a lot of trouble deciding on which maps API to work. It was between GoogleMaps API, AppleMaps, and Esri's ArcGIS, and we encountered serious issues with each.

-Using bitbucket for the first time

-Creating a database and webserver for the first time (we have a lot more first times - too many to list!)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Half of our team had never been to a hackathon before, and everyone on our team learned a lot. One member came into the hackathon never having written a line of code in her life! She did the backend portion that matched users looking for a pairing to walk with. Another member was a first semester CS student who never wrote code before college and did the backend portion that handled the database of users and the destinations users were traveling to and from.

What we learned

Creating a product is a constantly evolving process! Sometimes you start out with an idea, and along the way the group decides that it's best to add and remove features, and that's totally fine.

What's next for WeMove

Some features we hope to expand to:

-User is able to share their walk with friends, so they can keep track of them and notify the authorities if they stray far from their intended path and cannot be reached

-Integrating DPS alerts that will tell you if there has been a crime that's occurred on your path within the past couple of hours

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