GoHelpMe

• 

  Home page

• 

  Victim sign up

• 

  Volunteer sign up

• 

  Live map updates for volunteers and victims

Inspiration: With recent natural disasters, millions of people are left affected by the damages, struggling to find help in the chaos. Emergency response teams often face delays due to overwhelming demand, communication breakdowns, and logistical challenges. At the same time, volunteers willing to help lack a structured way to connect with those in need.

Goal: We wanted to bridge this gap by creating GoHelpMe, a real-time emergency response platform that connects victims with nearby volunteers. By leveraging geolocation, instant notifications, and real-time mapping, we aim to ensure faster response times and more effective disaster relief efforts. Our goal is to empower communities to support each other in times of crisis—because when disasters strike, every second counts. The goal of this app is to connect disaster victims and available volunteers/resources in real-time. When disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, floods, or earthquakes strike, relief efforts can be chaotic and uncoordinated. This app uses crowdsourcing and real-time mapping to quickly and efficiently connect those in need with those who can help.

Tech Stack: 🛠 Frontend – Built with React Native & Expo, providing a seamless experience for both victims and volunteers. 📍 Geolocation – Used Expo-Location API to fetch and update live user locations. 🔔 Notifications – Implemented Expo-Notifications to alert volunteers when they are near a victim. 🗺 Mapping – Integrated react-native-maps for real-time tracking and radius-based matching. 🌍 Backend – Hosted on Vercel, with API endpoints handling help requests and volunteer data.

Future Updates: Right now, volunteers get notifications when they’re near a victim, but there’s no way to formally accept a request. A better system would let volunteers: See a list of nearby victims in need. Ability to accept a request, notifying the victim with their name and contact info. Adding authentication would make the platform more secure and organized: Victims can track requests, and volunteers can manage accepted requests.

We learned how to work efficiently under time pressure, prioritize essential features, and integrate real-time location tracking and notifications to create a seamless user experience.

Challenge: Since it was out first time competing in a hackathon, we faced challenges with time and syncing all our different components together. One specific challenge was with AWS cloud servers. We had difficulty implementing the database with the server, so we used Vercel. In the end, CUHackit was a fulfilling experience and we learned a lot about full stack mobile development.

Built With

• and
• css
• deployment
• expo-location
• express.js
• for
• neon
• node.js
• postgresql
• prisma-orm
• react-native
• table
• typescript
• vercel