SafeHer

Inspiration

Being female college students, safety has always been a concern for us especially when walking around campus at night or if we have to walk somewhere alone. That feeling of paranoia and fear is one of the worst feelings to have while trying to pursue an education because it creates an extra obstacle in our way. That is why we were inspired to create an app that makes all women feel safe wherever they go. This way women can freely go wherever they want whenever they want.

What it does

SafeHer has many features that ensure the safety of the user. One of the main features is that there is a map that users can add pins on with a description. For example, if someone is being followed by a suspicious guy or a weird car they can add a pin with a description of what is happening. That way other users going around this area can be alerted of the possible danger. A history of those pins as well as recent news in that area can be found on the Incident History page. Additionally, the app has a page with resources including different hotlines and websites that can help/ educate our users in different situations. Our users can also add a list of their important contacts like friends or family in case of an emergency. Finally, the users can call the authorities in case of life threatening danger.

How we built it

We built SafeHer using a platform called Thunkable which allowed us to add many features and functions as well as implementing a backend database for storing all the information that the users enter.

Challenges we ran into

We faced many challenges in all of the stages of our designing process. Whenever we were first brainstorming ideas, we struggled to find an idea that solves a problem that we were passionate about and that we can ensure its design will have the target audience in mind. However, after help from the PNC workshop and the mentors present at the hackathon we were able to formulate a problem that we can solve in an intuitive and creative way. After landing on an idea came the challenge of figuring out which platform to use. We used Thunkable because even though it does not use coding languages we still needed to learn how to use its different functions and how to use the block coding to properly implement each element. We faced many challenges with using thunkable and at times had to watch videos and tutorials and read documentation to be able to get started on the right path. The final and biggest challenge was the limited time window that we had. We had to figure out the right balance of technical difficulty and what the final product will be able to accomplish and through hours of hard work we managed to both be challenged by our project and have something to show for that hard work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the accomplishments that we are proud of is participating and completing our very first hackathon and developing our very first app. We are also proud of the problem that we are solving because not only does it affect us but millions of females around the world.

What we learned

Through this process, we learned how much hard work you need to put in to actually accomplish something. Additionally, at first we were hesitant about creating an app because none of us had experience in it before but we now learned that you do not have to be experienced in something to be able to accomplish it. You can learn and improve along the way and that is much better than being an expert at what you are doing and not getting out of your comfort zone.

What's next for SafeHer

In the future we would like to add even more features to SafeHer including a one-tap call for help system where a user can simply push their power button for a certain amount of time and the app will automatically notify the authorities and loved ones. Additionally we would like to incorporate violence and crime data from each region into a rating system that tells the user how safe the area they are about to travel to is. Another feature we would like to add is being able to report a pin in case someone put sensitive information on their and only admins can actually remove the pins. Finally, our hope is that we get SafeHer ready to be published and used by females around the world so they can walk around safely without worrying about whether or not they will make it home safely.

Built With

• airtable
• thunkable