FlareRed

Website Homepage
Features
Features
App Login
App Login
Create your Safety Network
App Homepage
Homepage after Flare Activation
Link that Safety Network Receives via Flare Activation
Location Alert Notification from Flare

Inspiration

As women of this world, as humans, we wish to travel around the world without the fear of becoming the victims of assault or threat. However, that is not always the case.

As the number of women travelers grow, the disturbing cases of sexual assault and harassment also increases. Statistics say 2 in 5 women reported that they were sexually assaulted while traveling alone. A survey done in 2021 stated 88% of women traveling solo had the experience of being threatened or feeling unsafe by the environments around them, and 12% of those had been physically attacked or threatened. The most disturbing fact about this problem is that female travelers are more liable to opportunistic crime, kidnap, or targeted attack.

Our team wanted to develop an application that connects these traveling women to their trusted contacts, to help them to no longer fear solo traveling and minimize the threat they may face.

What it does

FlareRed is an intuitive safety app designed for women travelers. By syncing up with your phone’s contacts, you can create a safety network of trusted emergency people. With the press of a button, users can activate a “flare”, an emergency alert signal, to their pre-selected safety network, alerting them in real-time through a secure, private link that shares your real-time location.

How we built it

We built the front-end website using Tailwind CSS, HTML, JavaScript and Figma. The website also incorporates motion graphics made through graphic design and LottieFiles. The back-end location tracking and warning prototype was built with a combination of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and Node.js. The real-time location tracking used the HTML geolocation API, the Leaflet library to render the map and socket.io.

Challenges we ran into

While working on FlareRed, we ran into a multitude of pressing challenges; getting the API for SMS communications was one of the most challenging problems. Most of the SMS API were set behind a paywall, and us being high school students, couldn't provide the budget for building and integrating those APIs. Instead, we shifted our focus to the possibility of our app and website providing the necessary communications technology.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

UX/UI design that is responsive
Beautiful graphics
Implementing real-time location tracking through APIs without previous experience

What we learned

As hackers without extensive experience, we learned a lot of development skills throughout the project. For one, our team started backend development completely from scratch and worked with unfamiliar frontend frameworks.