Inspiration

Every year millions of students and visitors are forced to leave their phones, bags and valuables outside exam centres, temples, museums and other restricted venues. Existing solutions rely on paper tokens, roadside shops or manual counters that provide little accountability. We wanted to build a software-first solution that eliminates this trust gap without requiring expensive smart lockers.

What it does

SafeTag is an AI-powered, hardware-free smart storage platform that digitizes the complete deposit-to-return process. Staff register belongings, AI identifies deposited items using computer vision, a QR receipt is generated instantly, WhatsApp notifications are sent to visitors, and belongings are returned through secure QR verification.

How we built it

We built SafeTag using Next.js 14, MongoDB, Tailwind CSS, Google Cloud Vision API, Twilio WhatsApp API, Cloudinary and Vercel. The platform includes Visitor, Operator and Admin panels with AI-assisted verification, analytics dashboards and QR-based tracking.

Challenges

Building accurate AI-based item detection, secure QR verification, real-time notifications and a hardware-free workflow while keeping the system simple enough for any exam centre or temple to adopt.

Accomplishments

Working web platform AI-powered item detection QR-based secure return WhatsApp notifications Multi-venue support Zero hardware deployment

What's next

Pilot deployments with exam centres, expansion to temples, museums and government buildings, multilingual support, mobile apps and advanced AI analytics.