"The Prince Charming to your Cinderella if you like night walks. Call emergency services, Lyft, or a friend, all on one platform. Horse-drawn carriage in the works."
We like walking at night, but we don't like getting mugged. We can't program personal bodyguards (yet) so preventative measures are our best bet. Accessibility and intuitiveness are key in our idea.
HelpIs allows users to contact services when they feel unsafe. Location trackers integrate tech into emergency services, which tend to lag behind corporations in terms of tech advancements.
We heavily relied on the use of APIs from Twilio and MapBox to create our project. Specifically, we employed Twilio Programmable Voice for calling, Mapbox GL JS for map display and geolocation, and Mapbox Directions API for route finding and travel time prediction. The web app itself is built with VanillaJS (:p), HTML, and CSS.
Our original design centred on mobile connectivity through a phone app and a wider range of extendable features. Unfortunately, one of our teammates couldn't make it as scheduled, and we had to make some trade-offs. Eventually, we pulled through and are thrilled to exceed many goals we set for ourselves at the start of the hack!
Also, Alison thought the name was HelpIs (as in like Help is coming!) but Alex (who came up with the name) assumed she could tell it was Helpls (like Help + pls = Helpls). He even wrote about it in the footnotes of his mockup. Embarrassing...
We are so proud of the concept behind HelpIs that we decided to make a pitch for the first time! Thanks Alex for redoing it like four times!
Differentiating our program from existing services is important in product ideation!
We want to make it mobile! There are a few more features that we had planned for the mobile version. Specifically, we were looking to use speech-to-text and custom "code words" to let a user contact authorities without alerting those around them, inspired by the famous 911 call disguised as pizza order! 🤩🤩🤩