The inspiration for this app comes from the recent natural disasters and terror events that have been occurring around the United States and the globe. From our personal experience, when traveling to foreign places, there is always a sense of fear as it is difficult to get information on what is going on and where. We also realized that it is difficult to keep loved ones posted constantly and consistently on your safety status during these trips as well.

What it does

Safescape intelligently analyzes real-time new's articles and classifies them as a "non-safe" or "safe" event and notifies users in the respective locations if the article is deemed "non-safe." The app provides emergency contact information and a map of escape routes for the location that you are in. The app has a report button that sends a text to local emergency personnel and notifies users in the vicinity that an emergency is happening. In the event of an emergency, the app also allows the users the options to contact loved one's in a quick and easy manner.

How we built it

Our backend is a Flask server. We used Google Cloud Platform to intelligently analyze news articles. Microsoft search to pull news articles. Wrld Maps to display a map for the users. Sparkpost API to send out a notification to the users affected. UnifyId to authenticate users.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges including getting the Unifyid SDK to work as well as working with the API's in general.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of sticking through with our app even when nothing was working and figuring out how to get all the API's to run properly. Also proud of our designs and the functionalities we were able to get working in our project.

What we learned

We learned a ton this hackathon. From integrating API's to sending notifications, most everything required looking into something that we haven't worked with before.

What's next for Safescape

There are a ton of functionalities that are half implemented or implemented not as well as we would like. We would love to add real escape routes based on the venue that the user is at and other stretch features such as alerting the police and potentially identifying whether there is danger based on the movement of the individuals around you.

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