Donor Finder

A Messenger bot allows people to request blood donation from nearby donors.

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Inspiration

It was January 2017 when I first began working on the idea of a blood donation platform which could revolutionize the process and enable people in distress to find the right blood donor in time of need. After a lot of research, we came to the conclusion that although there are several websites and apps that work towards the realization of this aim, almost all of them had several drawbacks. Most of them do not take the privacy concerns of the users seriously, which results in a lot of spam calls and messages. Many of them work in a complex manner resulting in a “not-so-techie” person being unable to use them. There are many apps which helps find blood donors, but the question remained if people would install an app which they are going to use only if a situation arises.

So, We started thinking about what could be done to ensure a simple, user-friendly platform to help people connect to blood donors which also protects the privacy of both ends & also solve the purpose using the existing platforms. That’s when the idea of a chatbot came to my mind, thus resulting in the creation of Donor Finder bot using Facebook Messenger Platform

Why we choose Facebook Messenger for DonorFinder

Almost all users who stay on the Internet at least use Facebook. Generally, users never uninstall Facebook or messenger apps & they stick to the app all day around. There are almost 500+ Facebook groups which intend to solve the issue of finding blood donor.

What is Donor Finder bot?

DonorFinder bot is the messenger bot that allows people to request blood donation from nearby donors and also give the ability to everyone to be a blood donor at the nearby area if his age is 18 or older and he did the blood examination test.

How it works?

when you came to the bot for the first time, you ‘ll have a brief introduction about how it works and the pre-requirements from donor and receiver,

Donor: will be asked to choose his blood type, age, location ( user can send his location by using messenger location button ) and enter his phone number

Receiver: When you request a blood donation you’ll be asked to send your location, and choose the needed blood type, phone no & timing.

Algorithm : Bot will analyse every request based on location & blood group, whenever it found a new request and it gets it is location and match it with the users location to get donors nearby this location with the same blood type then broadcast a message to everyone around this user asking him to donate blood for someone nearby . When user choose ‘Yes’ bot will share each other's phone no. through the Messenger bot.

That's how we are maintaining the user data private by not sharing directly what others do on their website.

How we built it

We worked for 7–8 months, took feedback's, suggestions, and criticisms from a number of people, made necessary changes and finally a few days before Durga puja our bot was ready and we planned to make it public after Dussehra.

We have used Chatfuel to make the user flow as it's a bit easier for us to make, as we are not so techie but we are passionate about the problem that we are solving. Later Debjyoti joined our team who have taken over the tech part. We used Chatfuel API to save the user data & running all the algorithm to match the user based on two parameters. We have used TypeScript ( For Backend ) & MongoDB ( For Storing Database ) & this are running on AWS free tier & MongoDB Basic Servers.

Challenges we ran into

When I was scrolling through my Facebook news feed, I came across people marking themselves as blood donors. Upon analyzing, I found that Facebook itself has launched its own platform to help people reach blood donors. This came as a shock to me and my team as we were planning to use Facebook ‘s messenger platform for the same purpose, and here Facebook, the company which has been an inspiration to us and many like us had launched a similar thing on its own. But we believe, there are a lot of things to be taken care of thus we are not leaving our glory easily for anyone, we are passionate about our Idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Moreover, the response & feedback from the users is really appreciating but without proper media coverage, we couldn't reach to masses thus I can't any numbers now. We are initially promoting this organically in various groups from there we have got lots of positive vibes & responses so far.

What we learned

At the end of this We earned nothing but confidence, courage, and eagerness to do something always better and better. _ Life is not about only creating bank balance it’s about creating an impact on the peoples around you. _

What's next for Project Red

There will be some future update in the bot

  1. Donor & Receiver Direct Chat options.
  2. Search NearBy Hospital & Also Direct connec
  3. Connect with Local Ambulance using the same way.
  4. Connect with Blood Banks to check the Blood Stocks, so that Receiver don't need to visit different Blood Banks. There are more possibilities with the bot, We are really hopeful to take it to the next level. As we don't want to limit this Donor Finder bot with just Blood Donation.

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