RakshaNet

RakshaNet: AI safety app. Detects distress, shares live location & voice with guardians, police & nearby people so help arrives faster.

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Inspiration

Most personal-safety apps make the same mistake: they promise things they can't actually deliver. "14 trusted responders nearby," automatic emergency dispatch, always-on protection — features that only work if a real backend, a paid SMS gateway, and an active user base already exist. For a hackathon project, that's usually just a nice-looking lie.

I wanted to build the opposite: an app where every feature either genuinely works, or clearly says it doesn't. RakshaNet only claims what it can back up with real code.

What it does

RakshaNet is a personal-safety companion that works entirely in the browser — no backend, no paid services, nothing to install for the people you're trying to reach.

  • Real live location — pulls your actual GPS coordinates and reverse-geocodes them to a real place name
  • One-tap SOS — hold the SOS button to open a pre-filled text with your live location to your emergency contacts, or call 112 directly
  • Voice-activated code word — say a phrase you've set, and RakshaNet triggers an SOS automatically using real browser speech recognition
  • Safety timer — a real countdown that checks in on you when it ends, and starts an SOS if you don't confirm you're safe
  • Persistent safety circle — your contacts, code word, and activity history are saved locally and survive a refresh

Features that need infrastructure we didn't have time to build — like a live responder network — are visibly labeled "not live in this demo" instead of faked.

How we built it

Plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no framework, no build step. That was a deliberate choice: it means the safety-critical path (location → alert) has zero points of failure from a server going down.

  • navigator.geolocation for live location tracking
  • The Web Speech API for hands-free code-word detection
  • sms: and tel: URI schemes to open real messaging/calling apps pre-filled with an alert, instead of pretending to send them silently
  • localStorage for contacts, code word, and activity history
  • A free, no-key reverse-geocoding API to turn coordinates into a real place name

Challenges we ran into

  • A real cross-browser bug almost shipped silently. Early on, several top-level JavaScript variables shared names with HTML element IDs (toast, contactsModal, codeWordModal). Chrome tolerated it, but Safari throws Can't create duplicate variable that shadows a global property and refuses to run the script at all — meaning the entire app would have been dead on arrival for every iPhone user. Renaming three variables fixed it, but finding it meant testing in something closer to a real WebKit engine, not just Chrome DevTools.
  • Being honest is harder than it sounds. It's tempting to fill a UI with confident-sounding copy. Deciding exactly which claims to keep, soften, or remove — like the "14 responders nearby" placeholder — took more thought than writing the feature itself.
  • Browser APIs aren't as portable as they look. Speech recognition, the Notification API, and Web Share all behave differently — or don't exist at all — across Safari, Chrome, and Android. Building around that gracefully, instead of assuming one browser's behavior, shaped a lot of the code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

That "fully functional" isn't binary — it's a set of honest tradeoffs you make explicit to the user. And that testing across real engines (not just your own browser) catches bugs that would otherwise only show up in a judge's hands, at the worst possible time.

What's next for RakshaNet

  • A real backend with an SMS gateway (e.g. Twilio) for guaranteed delivery
  • A native app wrapper (React Native/Expo) for background location and always-on voice detection
  • A real registered-responder network for the community protection feature
  • End-to-end encryption for location data in transit and at rest

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