Inspiration
As students with family in West Africa, we’ve been close to personal situations in which the difference between life and death was quick access to medical aid. One call, quicker service or a nearby expert or volunteer could’ve made a big difference, preventing a life from being lost. We were inspired by this problem to pursue a community solution that would hopefully help to save lives.
Oftentimes, in developing countries, even big cities, speedy access to quick medical or a centralized emergency service is not possible, for many reasons. In the case of an emergency, time is often of the essence and a few minutes can be a vital difference. We wondered, what if you could crowdsource the power of the communities nearby and even faraway to aid in these situations? What if at the push of the button you could notify not only nearby health professionals, but also family members who may able to quickly come and help?
Having this in mind, we thought creating a platform to connect these professionals to those that need help would fill a significant gap, and use the power of communities to achieve that.
What it does
Though we didn't get the chance to fully complete the app, the general idea was to build a phone app that acts as a LifeAlert for those who live in developing countries or rely on community-based healthcare. Specifically, we want to build a system that allows people to send alerts to a list of emergency contacts. The app would then search for others within a certain radius that have the app and are signed up as helpers and send a location to that person.
How we built it
The app is build using React Native. We prototyped it using Figma and before that drew our prototypes.
Challenges we ran into
As none of us have completed a hackathon prior to this one, we found that the scope of our project didn't quite match our teams skill level and time availability. Setup was a bit of a challenge, and we also ran into a couple issues integrating various APIs and building a backend. We spent hours figuring out how to use APIs, learning React-Native and all its packages, uploading to a fire-base. One big thing was figuring out how to collaborate with React-Native. We stayed up late trying Atom, GitHub, before finally resorting to a creative solution with expo snack, working on different components apart and bringing them together in one centralized screen.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of the fact that we were able to produce a semi-working app in the short span of time that we were given considering our experience at the time. From prototyping to an app in a day, we learned, used and synthesized skills in ways that we could have never imagined a week ago.
What we learned
We learned a lot about React and about app development in general. Workshops and social learning allowed us to pick up skills that we wouldn’t have otherwise, and building an app front to back-end was relatively new to us. It’s awesome what the power of hackathons, with the time pressure and drive can accomplish! Thanks TreeHacks!
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