Sheltered

Inspiration

Our inspiration was that homelessness is a large social issue in Toronto with us all seeing and finding people without homes staying outside in the cold Toronto winter without a roof over their head or any warm food.

Yet, 95% of homeless people have phones, and 80% of those have smart phones. We want to help those in need have better access and information about the services they need.

What it does

The app directs people in need to local shelters and also lets people register the location of nearby shelters or their own location. Users can specify what services they're interested in receiving and the map will display accordingly.

How it works

The mobile app runs on React Native and lets clients and users register themselves on the application and stores the data in a MongoDB server. The shelter's register location is also stored in MongoDB and when the app is loaded up we use the Google Maps API to then query through all user's nearby addresses and then displays the geotagged locations on a map. The queries are also filtered based upon services the user is looking for i.e food, shelter, and clothing.

Social Purpose

On product-launch, Sheltered can impact and aid the homeless population greatly. Homeless people will be able to easily find the nearest shelter to them with the use of the phone without having to look too hard and lets shelters register their location and what they offer in an easy to locate platform

Tech

Sheltered uses a number of open source projects and tools to work properly:

ReactNative - The entire android app is written using React Native and Javascript!
node.js - The backend for the application is build with NodeJS
npm -Essential to JavaScript development as it provided us many tools and libraries that we used to implement within the application.
Yarn - Used to install the tools needed for mobile web development
MongoDB - A noSQL database that is easy to use and quick to setup. It hosts all our backend data from user aute

Installation

Sheltered requires Node.js v4+ to run. You also need a mobile device

Install the dependencies using yarn and start the server.

$ cd backend
$ node server.js
$ yarn install
$ cd ../
$ cd frontend
$ yarn install
$ react-native run-android
$ react-native start

Challenges we ran into

Initial challenges we ran into was the inexperience of our development team with react-native as only 2 team members had experience with the framework
We all have troubles with troubleshooting setting up Android Studio and React-Native

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Obvious societal benefits from adopting the application
Members in the team gained first hand experience in mobile development by architecture design

What we learned

Role assignment for team members to best suite their strengths and increase productivity on project
Android app development
Learned how to implement API connnections