Soteria

About Soteria

Soteria is the Greek Goddess of safety and salvation, deliverance, and preservation from harm. We have drawn from her values to design a platform geared toward women safety. Our goal is to make women around the world feel safer and have quick access to services that can assist them when they don't.

The Inspiration

Women safety has always been a major concern, but there has been a sharp rise in the crimes committed against women in recent years. For any women to feel unsafe on the streets means we have failed as a society. Solutions that currently exist offer a subset of features across a variety of different apps, but there is no single app that provides all these features in one place, giving a woman easier access.

We wanted to address the major concerns that a woman might have:

• Facing safety concerns when outside
• Being harassed when at a bar or club and needing assistance
• Being uncertain about the safety of an area they are travelling through
• Finding women going through similar situations

Soteria factors these to provide a singular solution to make it more convenient to access.

Features

SOS Alerts with Nearby Help

• While there are plenty of apps as well as features built in to newer mobile phones today, all of them can only alert the contacts set by the user
• Our platform will send the pre-configured SOS message message to 3 set contacts as well as alerting other women nearby that also have the app to a person's distress and gives them the opportunity to provide assistance
• We also allow women to sign up on our website to be protectors with their home addresses and phone numbers. They too will recieve SMS alerts of a woman in distress when the distress is logged close to their home and they have the opportunity to respond
• We have included a text-to-911 feature as well, however, since it only works in certain states, this can be turned off

Safe Travels

• Women can mark areas they travel through as safe or unsafe
• At a verification threshold, the area will be marked as unsafe
• A user can go into the app at any time and mark areas as unsafe along with selecting the criteria that made them provide this feedback
• A person that has the app installed and is travelling through that area will be alerted that the area is marked as unsafe
• Others can use this information to plan their trips better and avoid these areas

Club / Bar Mode with Protection Partners

• Our idea is to have clubs and bars register with us in a mutually beneficial relationship as protection partners
• These clubs and bars will benefit from increased customers as women using our app will be more likely to visit them
• Women will benefit knowing that should they feel unsafe or too inebriated to travel home, they can easily and discreetly ask for help from the staff through our app
• This allows women to go out and enjoy a party worry free
• They can also upvote or downvote a protection partner. 3 downvotes would result in them being removed from our platform

Find a Friend

• This allows women to find other nearby verified users when they feel unsafe but are not actively in danger

Web Signup

• Women who do not wish to register on the app can also register on our website
• They go through the same verification process and can then receive alerts for SOS messages near their home location

Technology Stack

• Our app is developed in Flutter and works on both iOS and Android
• Our website is hosted on Google Cloud Platform
• Our database is Firebase from Google
• We use Twillo to manage text messages for SOS alerts and calls

How it Works

Signing up on the App

1. Women sign up on our app and must be verified through their email, mobile and government ID plus a picture they take through the app
2. Their email is authenticated through Google Firebase auth
3. Their phone number is authenticated through Twilo
4. Their ID is verified via OCR and image matching on GCP and compared to the information they have provided
5. Users must be verified before they can login to the app
6. After logging in, they set up their 3 emergency contacts and chose whether they would like to alert 911 on an SOS and whether they'd like the platform to find and update nearby users and protectors as well

Triggering an SOS

1. On Home, users have the SOS button, which when double tapped triggers the SOS alert which updates their Firebase status
2. Google Firestore sees this update and runs a cloud function to send messages to their 3 emergency contacts, text-to-911 and nearby contacts through Twilo
3. As the app requires location permission at all time, this location is used by the cloud function and compared to the locations of other app users as well as women who have registered their home addresses as protectors on our website.
4. Each person on this list is sent a message that a person is in trouble and asks if they'd like to assist.
5. Only when they chose yes, are they given the current location of the user in distress. This allows us to maintain a record of the people who know the location

Going Out

1. A user can search the app or our website for a list of verified protection partners
2. In the app, they can then mark that they are travelling to a location, switching the SOS alert to also alert staff at that location inplace of 911 and nearby protectors

Safe Travels

• A user can mark certain areas as unsafe and provide reasons for that rating
• As the app tracks location constantly, when a user nears such an unsafe area, a cloud function triggers a Twilo SMS alert to let them know they are nearing an unsafe area
• This can also be used by other app users to plan their trips accordingly

Find a Friend

• This performs a simple location based search to return the nearest protector
• However, it alerts and confirms that the protector is okay to assist before providing a location to the app user

Future Steps

• Implementing Travel Safety to manage Safe Zones and overlay them on Google Maps
• Pairing up with governments to verify IDs and emergency services to provide them with alerts as well
• Building our women-only forum board
• Integrating the app with smart wearables like watches to make triggering an SOS alert easier
• Web scraping incident reports in areas and automatically changing their safety rating

Built With

• css
• firebase
• flutter
• google-cloud
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• twilio