Savior : 911 Emergency App

Inspiration

Currently in the United States we have an issue involving 911 dispatch services. The current 911 infrastructure has not adapted to modern devices. The current infrastructure can not get more pertinent information from current mobile technologies, such as text messaging, or GPS, and is slow with room for optimization. There are already apps like this, however those apps must develop their own infrastructure, thus they have to work directly with police departments to implement them, and due to the cost these services are not available for the average person. They are more intended toward large organizations such as colleges. We wanted to use current infrastructure already available within our smartphones to optimize this process and make it widely available to all types of consumers and essentially everyone in the US.

What it does

When a button is pressed, it gathers your GPS and other pre-entered information, and essentially creates a robo call using this information to alert a 911 dispatchers. The app utilizes preset buttons, to alert different levels of severity and the type of emergency to the dispatch services.

How we built it

We utilized Android Studio and java mobile SDKs to create a demo of the service. The demo is incomplete but demonstrates a general idea of what we wish to implement in the future.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest issue was time, as both of us were attending Hack-a-thon for the first time in our lives, it was difficult for us to gauge our time exactly. In addition, the scope of the project was too large to be completed in the allotted time, and would have taken longer to complete even had we had more experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Currently we have a demonstrable and well thought out user interface that we have carefully thought about. In addition, the learning process we went through was quite large because this was our first Hack-a-thon. My partner, for instance, managed to learn the GUI for Android Studios in these two days despite coming in with nearly no knowledge of it.

What we learned

We have developed greater skills in mobile development in general, and the Android SDK, as this is actually our first attempt at a real mobile application.

What's next for Savior : 911 Emergency App

We wish to develop a fully functional product, that can hopefully benefit the lives and safety of all those who can use it, which is hopefully a lot of people, as the intention is to finish and publish a free application with this software.