Safety Circle

Inspiration

Last year there were more than 380 terrorist attacks worldwide leaving thousands of people dead and many more wounded and more than 18000 people died being in the wrong place in the wrong time when natural disasters happened. These disturbing facts led us to creating Safety Check, first crowdsourced alert mobile app that enables users to report any dangerous situation or happening and instantly notify others that are in their immediate proximity. Be providing people with our app, we are convinced that there will be more lives saved during future incidents and people will not only benefit from being notified about dangerous happenings and situations but also they will be able to contribute to better humanity by initiatively reporting happenings near them.

What it does

Users can report emergency situations with two clicks, and the data is sent immediately to the server. Initially, other users in a small radius are warned about dangerous events automatically. Once the operational team verifies the data, and other users confirm it, the emergency notification is broadcast more widely. This allows users who might not already be in danger to completely avoid it and do something different that day.

How I built it

We divided the work into frontend, backend, and business development. On the frontend, we used Swift to make an iOS app to interact with our users. We connected the frontend to the backend with a RESTful API. On the backend, we made a node.js server to store and manage the data, as well as an interactive operations console to deal with real time events.

Challenges I ran into

We had trouble setting up push notifications, because Apple are Apple, but we managed to find a workaround. We also had some difficulties with making an update system with the right blend of speed, reliability and persistence. This issue arose because we needed to make it easy for users to file an initial report, but also make it possible to add more data if they had it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We managed to learn a new templating language, as well as new networking constructs to achieve this project. We also managed to work synergistically with each other, and build off of our individual strengths. Given that we had never worked together before, we made a great team.

What's next for Safety Circle

We hope to continue developing this app and bring to a wider market, so it can begin to have a difference in peoples' lives. While we would consider it an amazing success if it saves just one life, we believe that it has the potential to do much more than that.