SafeZone

Inspiration

Dementia care is full of quiet panic. Someone you love walks the same loop every day — until they don’t. Families don’t need another complicated gadget. They need three answers, fast: Are they safe? Where are they? Do I need to act? SafeZone was inspired by that moment of waiting, and by the idea that two phones a family already owns should be enough to build a calmer safety net.

What it does

SafeZone is a browser-based safety system for families caring for someone with dementia.

• The patient phone shares live location
• The caregiver phone shows a clear safety status and map
• Families draw a Home Zone around home or the neighborhood
• Status escalates thoughtfully: safe → approaching → alert → family responding
• Caregivers get shared alerts and can claim “I’m responding” so the whole family stays coordinated
• Setup is short: names → Home Zone → one-time QR pairing

SafeZone stays honest about GPS — it always shows the accuracy radius instead of pretending to be room-level precise.

Try it: https://safe-zone-app.vercel.app
Guided demo: https://safe-zone-app.vercel.app/caregiver?demo=1

How we built it

• Frontend: React + Vite PWA with a caregiver dashboard, patient tracker, and guided onboarding
• Backend / data: Supabase Auth, Postgres, Row Level Security, Realtime, and Edge Functions
• Core logic: geofence state machine (safe / approaching / grace / alert), pairing tokens, location ingest, care responses
• Notifications: Web Push (VAPID) for boundary alerts
• Deploy: Vercel for the app, Supabase for persistence and realtime
• Also includes a local Express + WebSocket prototype path for fast hacking

Challenges we ran into

• Browser location limits: a PWA can’t reliably track in the background once iOS/Android suspends the browser, so we designed around an open patient session and were honest about that boundary
• Auth friction: email magic-link rate limits and redirect/PKCE issues during demos
• Edge Function pairing failures in production, which forced fast fallbacks and clearer demo paths
• Balancing a calm caregiver UX with enough technical truth (accuracy, freshness, connection) to be trustworthy

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• A full end-to-end product story: landing → onboarding → pairing → live caregiver dashboard
• A guided demo that runs the real geofence states, not a fake slideshow
• Design centered on reassurance first, not dashboard clutter
• Secure one-time QR pairing instead of sharing permanent secrets
• Shipping a live deploy families can actually open on two phones

What we learned

• In dementia care, clarity beats features — one sentence of safety status matters more than ten charts
• Honest GPS communication builds more trust than false precision
• Real-world constraints (mobile browsers, push permissions, auth email limits) shape the product as much as the idea
• The best demo is a story caregivers recognize immediately: worry → warning → action → relief

What's next for SafeZone

• Native patient tracking for true background location on iOS/Android
• Multi-caregiver invites and richer family coordination
• Smarter quiet hours / reduced alert fatigue
• Offline-tolerant patient buffering when connectivity drops
• Care facility pilots with clearer onboarding for non-technical families

Built With

• react
• typescript