U-Help

Log-in screen
Create an account
Sign-in page
View locations
Browse or search for people
A user's profile page
List of location requests for the user
Messages list
Chat with a user

Inspiration

With the ongoing situation in Ukraine, several Ukrainians have had no choice but to flee their country as refugees. As a result, Ukrainian refugees have several hardships, including difficulty in connecting with loved ones and making sure they are safe, finding nearby support such as shelters, and sharing updated information about their current circumstances in order to help each other. Additionally, refugees may lose their phones and have trouble fully communicating without cross-platform software. We wanted to find a way to help solve these problems as much as we could. To start, we came up with a mobile app that helps Ukrainian refugees contact each other and check locations. We hope to eventually upgrade this as a cross-platform application.

What it does

U-Help allows refugees to search for, message, and request and share locations with their loved ones. Refugees can also locate shelters and notify others with annotated location updates. Our app runs on both iOS and Android.

How we built it

We built the prototype using Android Studio with the Flutter plug-in and Firebase for database development. For our location feature, we used the Google Map API.

Challenges we ran into

Working with Firebase
Requesting user data validation
Accepting incoming user requests
Connecting real-time user requests to Firebase Firestore

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Contributed to helping Ukrainian refugees and possibly help relieve future humanitarian problems
Developed a minimal viable product
Developed a strong front-end and back-end
Focused on UI-design