Ping

It's late at night and you're walking home alone. You begin to feel uneasy in your environment so you launch the ping app and start transmitting your location to a local monitored data base.

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The inspiration

The inspiration behind this project actually came from my mom. When we heard about the potential for a safety app, I was reminded of the frequent times when my mom (who lives in Toronto) would just call me when walking home alone late if she ever felt unsafe. Even though I wasn't in the same city as her, the feeling of someone knowing where she was made her feel safe.

What it does

Ping let's the user hit the ping button within the app which causes the app to track the users location and send custom distress messages describing the distress. This tracking continues until the ping signal is negated by a second pressing of the button.

How we built it

We built the app user interface using react-native running on the expo app host for ios. The apps database was run in python on Flask-sqlalchemy library.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges with none of us knowing how to code in react-native or use any expo libraries. We ran into a lot of run-time errors with libraries not being compatible with different libraries versions. We had to adapt our code a lot to make sure that the app host would even let us run the app. Additionally, we had to change our database backend language and framework multiple as we tried to figure out how to cause the expo host to interact with the database. Unfortunately, all of the challenges caused us to run out of time before being able to implement some of the features that we wanted like distress level, automated messages to the user phone number, icloud login, background location updates(unavailable)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting a functional ios app working in a language we were entirely unfamiliar with.

What we learned

We learned the deployment process of and ios app, how to create front and back end with react-native, how to create python databases, perseverance / red bull proficiencies

What's next for Ping

We will continue to develop the app until we achieve all of our desired functionality and continue to work on fixing bugs. Additionally, we really like the idea of linking the app with our schools walk-home service to allow for users to interact with real people through the app for live support in distress situations.

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