SafeHer

SafeHer
Logo

Inspiration

1 in 3 women in Canada experiences sexual assault in her lifetime. At universities, 41% of all sexual assaults happen on campus. As a result, over 60% of women report feeling unsafe walking alone at night near or on campus. Imagine finishing a late study session and feeling your heart race—not from exams, but from walking alone in the dark.

At universities, there are existing resources to feel safer on campus, such as emergency phones and campus police escorts, but they are often underused, slow, or inaccessible.

Therefore, we wanted to change that with SafeHer, a campus buddy app for women.

What it does

SafeHer is a website that strives to help increase female student safety at night. Female university students are able to see the location of other women and message them to arrange a method to travel together at night.

SafeHer offers:

📲 Users to sign-up and login
🗺️ An interactive map where users can see actual campus geography and use proper map controls (zoom, pan, etc.)
📍 Smart markers to view the location of other female students, significant campus buildings and the status of travelling buddies (available or unavailable)
🚨 An emergency button to make an emergency call with your exact location
🗾 Walking paths that show the safest and most accessible walking paths
⭐️ Customizable user profiles to promote community and friendship building
💬 Messaging to connect with other users!
🌙 Dark mode for the homepage!

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build our website. For the map, we leaned on Leaflet, a JavaScript library for interactive maps.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into was using the Leaflet library for the first time and designing the UI to be user-friendly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment of this project was creating an interactive map where you can zoom in and out, see the locations of other users, significant campus buildings and accessible routes.

What we learned

We had a basic foundation of how to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript but through this project we expanded our knowledge to new libraries such as Leaflet. Additionally, for many of our team members, it was their first time learning about UI and how to pitch a project at a hackathon.

What's next for SafeHer

The next steps for SafeHer is fully building out the messaging system where you can send direct messages to other users. Additionally, when signing up, we will need to build security features to ensure that the space stays remained for women only and prevent any unwanted individuals.