ReachOut
Uniting Students and Elders: Fostering Community Connections Together!
Created on 20th April 2024
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ReachOut
Uniting Students and Elders: Fostering Community Connections Together!
The problem ReachOut solves
ReachOut proposes a simple solution to a common modern day social issue. Our goal is simple "Connecting Hearts and Hands Across Generations: Where elder's wishes meet students helping hands, all in the palm of your hand!". A nuclear family elder once over the age of 65 feels isolated and misses that sense of community. Since they have no family to take care of them, even a common errand like getting a carton of milk can become a hassle. That’s where ReachOut comes in. This isn't just another app. It's a bridge. A bridge between generations. A world where a friendly face shows up at the door, not just to complete task, but to share a conversation, a laugh. Connecting the elders to the children in this modern world is the noble cause we are solving. But ReachOut is more than just chores.
Features of the app:
(1) Ally : An A.I. chatbot, ally (conquer any challenge) that helps students that are confused and uninformed with a simple step by step solution.
(2) Video Calling for visual demonstration : We've built a secure video call function. So even if distance is a factor, that human connection can still flourish.
(3) Geolocation sharing: We have used Google maps api for geolocation sharing so that the student can reach the elder easily.
Our future plans include adding a SOS feature, KYC authentication using Aadhar number and School IDs and even more!
Challenges we ran into
Honestly, as first year college students we have a limited set of skills. But for this project we have pushed ourselves past our limits to create something meaningful to the society. There were multiple hurdles over the 36 hours of building. Our plan to provide an end to end service to the user caused us to add a lot of features that were quite hard to integrate. Firstly, neither of us have worked with Google Gemini API before so using that for prompt generation for a hassle. Secondly, adding the video calling feature was a nightmare for us and we ended up taking close to 6 hours on that single issue. But most importantly since this was an online hackathon the most important thing that was lacking was human connection. We missed screaming together in a room full of participants when the app finally worked.