Travel Buddy (Beginner Category)

Beginner Category

Inspiration

Many elderly people in the world aren't able to travel to places by themselves, especially in large cities, where many accidents can occur. They must rely on their children or relatives to help them, which puts a lot of burden on these people, as they are sometimes not available. This is why most elderly people are stuck at home, negatively affects their overall health.

What it does

Travel Buddy is an app that helps elders transport to anywhere they want, and tells them which buildings or businesses are accessible by the elderly. All the elders have to do is put in their destination. The app will display information about the destination, like different entrances, stairs, wheelchair ramps, and elevators. If it’s a restaurant, it will display things about the food cleanliness, spicy level, and more. Then, it will calculate the route that the person needs to take, according to their input of how much walking they can handle, etc. It uses public transportation, so the app will display the total price of the trip, where the user can buy the tickets and pay the fare through the app. This helps the elderly people not have to wait in long lines to buy tickets, or download many apps on their phone, which could be complicated. We’ll partner with transport companies, like the subway, and when someone pays and confirms through our app, they are able to get an online ticket. It tells them exactly which direction they need to go, and which types of transportation they need to get on, and where. If they’re on a train or boat, it will also use geolocation to remind them to get off at a specific station. When they are lost, they can call their “emergency contacts” that they put in to their app, like their kids.

How we built it

The user interface was created so that it is very easy to use for all types of people. The interface looks clean, and there are only a few buttons which have large labels on them. We used APIs of different transport apps to the elderly people buy all of their public transportation tickets through our app.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was that we didn't know how to make it user friendly for the target users, and how to build it. However, we overcame these challenges by interviewing some of our family members to see which user interface they thought were the easiest to use, and used online tutorials and workshops to help us create the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to successfully think of a well-rounded idea, and being able to present it. It was quite difficult to think of an idea that was innovative, and could also possibly work. It was also difficult to create the prototype being a beginner in programming.

What we learned

We learned a lot of teamwork and time management skills, but most importantly, we got to practice our ideation and creativity. We believe that this hackathon helped us learn a lot of useful soft skills, and also hard skills of programming.

What's next for Travel Buddy

After improving the app, testing further, and consultations, we could launch in large cities where there are a lot of elderly people. We will then expand to other areas and countries to have the aid the elderly population.

Built With

• api
• figma
• python