Inspiration
We chose to make this project because ever since we were little, we would see people we wished we could help on the streets. But because we were too young and didn’t have any money or resources of our own, we felt powerless. But now that we’ve grown up and our opportunities to give back to the community have expanded and opened up, we want to take advantage of it and utilize our skills and ideas to lend a helping hand. Though we are advised not to give money to them, this project is a way that we can still give back and benefit society.
What it does
Our project aims to connect the user with government programs and local organizations that can assist them. We plan to assist the user in 3 folds: Connecting the user with government programs, Assisting them in finding a job, and connecting them with community resources.
Based on the information provided by the user, the application will recommend government aid programs the user may qualify for. The application will automatically filter through the details of each program and its requirement to determine which of the programs will assist the user the most.
To help the user get restarted in life, the application will cooperate with local businesses to assist the user in finding a job that is suitable to them. Local businesses will be able to sign up and put up requests for jobs which the application will automatically display to users who meet the requirements.
Statistically many homeless and unfortunate individuals suffer from chronic mental illness or disease, so our application can also connect the user to community resources at their discretion. These community resources(if available) could range from food banks and shelters to psychiatrists or doctors. These resources will ensure that the user will feel that they are not alone and set them on the right path back to society.
Finally, our project will lower the stress currently put on social security by providing a centralized system in which the homeless can take over some of the responsibility and control over their path back to society.
Challenges we ran into
Of the many obstacles we faced during programming, the one that stood out the most was web scraping with unity. I had lots of experience with web scraping in python making a bot capable of getting stock info and analyzing. etc. However, we couldn’t code python in Unity. To make things worse, the amount of resources online was minimal outside of the actual documentation itself. This resulted in lots of hair pulling for hours on end, and lots of smashed keyboards. But after 2 weekends and a few weekdays in between, we were able to make it work.
What we learned
We learned Unity, C#, and some web scraping while creating this app.
What's next for S.H.R.E.W.
If we had more time, we would add facial biometric identification. We were unable to figure out in time how to implement this function due to the inconsistency in the ability to find the camera on each device. The function worked for some people, and not for others. We also had difficulty adjusting to the new coding language and working with openCV in C# because we had previous experience with python instead.
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