Silent Savior

Inspiration

In a situation where speaking could jeopardize your health or life, this app would help to keep you safe. I was firsts inspired with an article I saw about how many cell phones who call 911 don't automatically send their locations which could mean the difference between life and death. Taking that, along with the idea that images could not only help in justice situations but also as a method of explanation, I wanted to make sure that callers could send images to the dispatchers. When taking pictures, you hold the phone away from your face, and I considered the situation where it would be dangerous to use speakerphone while calling 911 and advanced the idea of a more visual interface.

What it does

My plan was that this app could be used as a simple way to get to a 911 operator. It could be used as a normal call, it could be put on speaker phone, and the Google Cloud Speech API would be used to take the operator's audio to text on the screen. The Google Cloud Vision API could take the images that the caller would be able to take and add tags that, along with manual sorting into categories, would allow the dispatcher to more easily organize assistance. After the emergency, the caller would be able to review the call and add more tags or adjust a comment they had.

How I built it

From a sketch on a napkin, I then made a paper prototype that I made into an interactive piece with POP. I then used Illustrator to make individual screens and uploaded them to Invision where I was able to string screens together and create a more realistic UI.

Challenges I ran into

I started this at around 4 in the morning and was working alone. There weren't too many technical things I ran into, but time and lack of viable iterations led to a lesser project. I wanted to do a whole lot more, and so that was a little frustrating.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of the idea because I believe that, if more thought out and with more resources invested, it could prove very helpful for individuals in noise-sensitive situations and individuals who cannot viably speak to an operator.

What I learned

Its a bit more fun to do the process with someone else, but its really rewarding to create a prototype in 12 hours all by myself.

What's next for Silent Savior

I really think that this could be a life saver in situations like mass shooters, domestic violence, hostage situations, and any emergency situations with deaf or hard of hearing individuals. I would love to work more with this idea to develop it to fruition and produce a product that could be used to help people in many situations.

Built With

• adobe-illustrator
• invision