Safety Net
Inspiration The project is based on the idea that a lot of people use the Internet searches to help them commit suicide.Recently there was a case where a girl in India killed herself after actually searching for 89 websites on how to kill oneself.The problem was major and was still ignored and there needed to be a solution which nobody had devised yet.So,our team decided to create a chrome extension which when installed on a computer can help prevent these incidents.
What it does/How it Works This app is a chrome extension and while installing it records the information about the user and one emergency contact(friend or family).It gives an option of selecting a panic button which redirect the user to the suicide hotline.Once installed,our algorithm helps record the searches made by the user over a given time frame.If the searches match the patterns like ‘suicide’,’kill yourself’ etc then the script records the number of times it was searched.If it exceeds a given counter,then an email is sent to the emergency contact provided during installation.This helps alert the other people that the user is trying to commit suicide. Built With We used HTML,CSS,javascript for the frontend,PHP and MYSQL for the actual implementation.
Challenges we ran into Much of the time was spent in researching on the suicidal keywords.The database got dysfunctional,we were not able to get the extension working easily. The help button when pressed was supposed to instantly connect the user to a chat window with the suicide hotline.However,we ran out of time to implement it. However, after spending tireless hours, we got the basic functionality rendered. What did we learn We got to try new languages and work with a diverse team. Most importantly we learnt how to code for more than 18 hours at a stretch.
Improvements We can add the functionality to get the most contacted people from the google circles(family/friends circle) of the user and add them to the emergency contacts. We can add the google maps to keep track of the locations of the places prone to most number of suicides.
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