Inspiration

Loneliness is a rising trend in modern life. While it is common, the effects of loneliness reach beyond your mood. Research finds that loneliness and social isolation can even lower your life expectancy. The groups often most affected are the elders in our communities. This resonates deeply with our group as we have loved ones who deal with these struggles. We wanted to create a tool to help the vulnerable members of our society to find connection and belonging in their community.

What does it do

Connects you to local events near you - from card games to beach walks, you can meet new people! Out&About was intentionally designed to have an intuitive user interface to provide a simple and straight forward experience for senior citizens.

How we built it

During the ideating phase, we were contemplating challenges that we have witnessed first hand for ourselves. Eventually, we landed on the idea that many senior citizens face loneliness. We wanted to create an app that would help them find community while being easy to understand and use.

We shared a Miro board and planned out how our project would work and who it was for. When we started building, we divided the work into frontend and backend, and put two team members on each sub team. During this stage, we heavily emphasized the importance of planning before building, as getting everyone on the same page would save many future troubles.

For the backend, we spent most of Saturday configuring our database (PostgreSQL), Docker, and writing a simple API to communicate with the database using Flask. For the frontend, we spent Saturday creating Figma designs for all the pages in the webapp, and beginning work on the TypeScript and styling in the frontend. On Sunday morning we reconvened and added key connections between our existing services, and finishing up styling for the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

As per usual in hackathons, we had to learn different technologies, from python and flask in the backend, to typescript and leaflet for our map up front.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're especially proud of being able to have a (mostly) functional full-stack product by the end of the hacking period. For the majority of our team, the technologies we used for this project were completely foreign, so we felt great about having everything working in time to finish. We are also proud of creating a technology that aims to make a positive impact in our local communities, and especially benefits one of the most important groups in our neighbourhoods, the elderly.

What we learned

By creating this project, we learned effective methods of concept generation and important concepts related to full-stack web development. Our backend developers learned about how Postgres SQL can be used to create tables for a database and how Flask can be used to create API endpoints to foster communication between the frontend and the backend. Our frontend developers learned about how Figma can be used for web design and how to implement the design in an organized way with React and CSS. We also familiarized ourselves with Git and its usefulness for sharing code and reverting back to previous versions of code as well as Docker which gave us the ability to containerize our project to be run on different systems.

What's next for Out&About

Given the nature of a hackathon, time was a constraint for the completeness of our project. Moving forward we would like to prioritize cybersecurity around user information and locations.

Built With

• css
• docker
• docker-(html
• flask
• html
• leaflet.js
• postgresql
• python
• react
• vite