PathPal

Inspiration

This year's theme for RecessHacks 5.0 was independence. Drawing from our own experiences, we found travel to be one of the most important parts of our daily social lives. As we become more independent, we travel without supervision more frequently, and so our parents are concerned about safety. We wanted to create an app to help alleviate stress by helping people find the safest and best transportation that is available to them.

What it does

Our app allows users to determine the safest means of transportation. Each method of travel is assigned a safety score from 0-100 that is evaluated based upon criteria such as routes, weather, popularity, etc. Also, users can verify with their school to be automatically connected with their peers and classmates. They can add emergency contacts who will be automatically alerted in the case of an emergency. All these features work together to help people stay safe!

How we built it

We used Flutter for the frontend and Python for the backend with FastAPI.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge that we encountered was the real-time data integration; trying to handle live updates for routes, safety scores, and peer connections was trickier than expected. Another challenge was creating the safety scoring metrics, which we solved through the use of AI.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're most proud of completing a full working MVP that has AI integrations within the time frame that the hackathon provided. We're also proud of our clean UI, which has multiple safety-focused features built in without sacrificing simplicity.

What we learned

We learned how to design safety-oriented features that still maintain privacy and usability. We also gained valuable experience working with Flutter and connecting it with the Python backend.

What's next for PathPal

We want to incorporate more real-world data, like lighting conditions and community-reported incidents, to make the scores more accurate. Also, we would like to work with schools to make PathPal an officially recommended tool for safe commuting.

Built With

• dart
• fastapi
• flutter
• openai
• postgresql
• python
• websockets