Safe Walkie

Safe Walkie helps women stay safe at night with real-time location, risk alerts, emergency voice/button triggers, and guardian dashboard monitoring.

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Inspiration

Safe Walkie was inspired by the need for a hands-free personal safety companion for people walking alone—whether commuting, traveling, or exercising. We wanted to leverage real-time location tracking, risk assessment, and emergency alerts to make solo walking safer.

What it does

Safe Walkie helps users:

  • Monitor personal risk levels with a real-time circular risk indicator.
  • Navigate safely with Mapbox-powered routes to their destination.
  • Trigger hands-free emergency alerts using a custom safe word.
  • Notify by calling guardians or emergency contacts instantly with location and risk information.
  • View weather updates to make better walking decisions.
  • Guardian users can see live location updates of the user for proactive safety monitoring.

How we built it

  • Frontend: React + Vite, styled with CSS, responsive design for mobile.
  • Mapping & Geocoding: Mapbox API for live maps, autocomplete, and routing.
  • Speech Recognition: Web Speech API to detect safe word triggers.
  • Emergency Handling: Audio alerts + simulated or real emergency calls (tel: or backend API).
  • State & Data Management: React state hooks, localStorage for live distress updates.
  • Backend Integration: REST endpoints for starting walks, polling risk scores, and notifying guardians.
  • Event-driven Architecture: An event-driven architecture with RabbitMQ as the message broker. Location updates, off-route detections, and emergency triggers are published as messages and processed by decoupled consumers (risk scoring, notifications, logging), enabling scalable, resilient workflows

Challenges we ran into

  • Ensuring hands-free safe word recognition worked consistently across browsers.
  • Synchronizing live location updates between user and guardian views.
  • Handling geolocation accuracy and simulating routes for testing without backend.
  • Designing a clean, responsive UI that accommodates maps, alerts, and controls.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Implemented a fully functional Guardian Dashboard for live monitoring.
  • Real-time risk score updates reflected on both circular indicator and check-in banner.
  • Hands-free safe word emergency trigger that works seamlessly.
  • Integrated Mapbox routing with live location tracking for user safety.
  • Created a demo-ready “Need Help” flow with modal and call functionality.

What we learned

  • How to combine multiple APIs (Mapbox, SpeechRecognition) into a cohesive app.
  • Best practices for React state management with real-time updates.
  • Techniques for simulating backend data and handling fallback routes.
  • Importance of user experience in emergency situations.

What's next for Safe Walkie

  • Push notifications for guardians when the user triggers an alert.
  • Twilio integration for real emergency calls and SMS.
  • Offline map support for areas with poor connectivity.
  • Customizable risk thresholds and user profiles.
  • Expand accessibility with voice feedback and haptic alerts.
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