The problem Safe Ride solves

Every day our newspapers are splashed with poignant accounts of abominable crimes against women travelling in cabs.
Travelling with a total stranger can be uncomfortable at times in India, especially as a woman. So, our project "Safe Ride" attempts to make things transparent by verifying the ID cards of the driver as well as the passengers. Using advanced security software like JWT and tesseract OCR, we are able to auto-detect the gender of the users, so that no user can make bogus accounts.

We take the data privacy of our users very seriously. As a result, we are not storing the IDs uploaded by the users during registration. Also, we are bcrypt hash algorithm, so that the users can be assured that their passwords are well-protected.

To use our application, the users have to first register. In registration, users are required to provide a genuine ID, which has their age, date of birth and gender mentioned on it. After registering, the user can either start a ride for himself or can carpool on any available ride. Here the user has access to the information about other passengers also travelling with him. Additionally, the user can also select, which type of car, on what date and to what location he is travelling.

Lastly, there are many other features that we wanted to add but couldn't due to time constraints. In future, we would like to add the 'map' feature to pick a location by pinpointing. Also, we want to add a 2-factor authentication method for login.

Challenges we ran into

1. We had never used the OCR for a javascript based application. So it took a significant amount of time to get it to work. We used Tesseract.js for the OCR part and went through all the documentation and snippets to use it optimally.

2. Since, we are new to hackathons, making the project collaboratively was something new to us. At the start, we messed up our git and GitHub branches. So had to delete that and create a fresh one. A lot of reading and googling went into finding the best ways of collaborating on a project on Github.

3. Editing the profile dashboard was a difficult task, which we accomplished by reading a lot of blogs on StackOverflow and medium.