Seniority

A web application that connects seniors with help with everyday tasks, while providing jobs for young adults.

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Many older adults are faced with a serious issue as they continue to age. As they age, many of these seniors become separated from their immediate family. And even for those whose family is nearby, with the world as busy as it is, it is difficult for the average family to find the time to take care of the older generations. These elders need assistance on a day to day basis, professional help is expensive, and many times, trusting younger adults can seem risky. This is where we came up with the idea for our application. We wanted to give an affordable, fast, and safe alternative to meet this growing need.

Our application provides an easy to use portal for seniors to obtain almost immediate help completing everyday tasks and needs. It also provides a mobile platform for young adults to use to make some extra money. Our application allows seniors to create a personal account, which saves their information. From the elderly user's perspective, upon login, the application immediately allows them to see if there are any young adults in the immediate area who are available to help. Then with just the click of a button, they are able to request one of these nearby people to come to help them. When the request for help is sent the nearest and helper is notified that someone is requesting their assistance. Then the helper can accept the job and then the elderly person will be charged by the hour for the work provided. When the helper is finished they end the job from their phone and the transaction is handled by our payment API. From the helper perspective, when they login they are able to make themselves available by clicking a switch. When this switch is activated, the helper is made visible to potential helpees. If there is a person who needs help, and the helper is active, and he or she is the nearest helper, they will receive a request to help. From there, the helper can accept or deny the job. When they are prompted with a window where they can see the length of the job. On this page, there is a button where they could end the job. When the job is ended the helper is told how much he or she made from that specific job and they are led back to the dashboard.

We began building the front-end of the web application with HTML5/CSS3, Bootstrap, SCSS, and jQuery. On the back end, we run an express.js server and node.js to serve the web pages. We used a PostgreSQL to host the user data and node.js to interact with the database. When the user logs in on the HTML form the user is authenticated with passport.js. If the user exists they are simply prompted to log in, else, they are logged in and entered into the database. As soon as the user logs in the geolocation are pulled from the javascript geolocation. This is stored in the database along with the user's other data. At the login and the register page, the user is able to select whether they want to be a "helper" or an "helpee" if the user logs into the system as a helper he is redirected to his/her dashboard. On this dashboard, we built a switch in CSS which signifies whether or not the user is available to work. We set up a web socket that listens on a web-hook so that when there is an available job, a modal will pop up letting the user know that there is an available job. On the helpee side, we set up Google Maps API with custom map markers that signify the available help within a ten-mile radius. On page load, a function calls a web-hook which runs a function that finds all of the users within a ten-mile radius and returns them back to the front end. At the center of the map is an icon representing the current user's geolocation. We built a button at the bottom of the page where the helpee can request help. This button hits a webhook which the helper is listening on and then the helper is notified. We used Bootstrap to activate a modal where the helpee is notified that help is on the way. When the work is finished we setup a payment API so that the payment transaction can be handled. We send the user's payment data to an appropriate payment API.

One of the challenges that we ran into was communicating between users. The helpers had to be able to request helpees and helpees had to be able to accept the jobs. Then they needed to be able to complete a payment. This posed a challenge because with many users keeping everything in order was difficult. Also, another challenge was version control. Even using git and git-hub we still had version control issues that almost completely derailed the project. At one point, we had to revert almost four commits back because of an error we had.

We believe that Seniority can be taken to a full-scale app and released to the public. We really feel that Seniority serves a very unfulfilled need in society today. This need will only continue to grow as people age and as our lives become busier and busier. Our application has the potential to go full scale and become revolutionary.

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