Watchdog

Inspiration

After the attacks on two different women in Iowa this summer, we were inspired to develop an application that could have potentially helped these individuals in distress.

What it does

Watchdog is an Android app that attempts to detect when the user is in distress or under attack. There is an emergency notification system which sends an SMS link of the user's current location to his/her emergency contacts, and also sounds an alarm to scare away the attacker. In addition to monitoring for signs of distress, the emergency notification system can also be triggered by saying "help".

How we built it

We built our application by interfacing with the phone's hardware, specifically voice commands, GPS, and gyroscope. We combined data available from the phone with built in functionalities. We also used libraries that allowed us to analyze speech.

Challenges we ran into

We all had different hardware (different phones and virtual devices), so we needed to streamline the application across all systems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finished our first Hack ISU project. We were able to modularize work such that we could all work independently and then integrate everything.

What we learned

We learned how to independently design and implement different components of an application and integrate them. We also got more experience interfacing with Android hardware.