The problem S.H.I.E.L.D solves

SHIELD is a Flutter app to help people, especially women, feel less uneasy and ensure their safety in any situation where they may feel threatened.
Our app provides features such as live location sharing, pre-recorded one-sided video calls, chats with our closest ones and emergency contacts, and video-conferencing channels with people from around the world.
The video features serve the purpose of not only bringing the user comfort but also letting others around you know that you are not alone and there are people who are aware of your whereabouts/location.

Video Conferencing Rooms

For the video-conferencing rooms, we used Agora API to create 6 different channels, any one of which can be joined by the user in times of need. There is also a feature to mute their microphones and switch their camera, as and when required. These rooms can provide comfort and protection in case someone is traveling alone (for example, at night) and are unable to reach their emergency contacts at that time.

Pre-recorded videos

We have added pre-recorded videos of one-sided video call conversations. This was implemented by uploading the videos onto firebase storage and then accessing them through a download URL. The pre-recorded videos serve as an extra precautionary measure for the user, in case no one is available to contact them at the time.

Live location tracking and group chat

Live location can be shared with multiple users using the group chat feature.
We believe that this app will provide protection and comfort to all those who might feel threatened or unsafe in any scenario.

Challenges we ran into

We faced many challenges while working on this. Some of them include the live location tracking API authentication key wouldn't work and in one case we had to update our entire flutter SDK to get plugins to work. We ran into a lot of errors while using the Firebase database to store videos. The most annoying issues were definitely containers which gave a huge number of errors and took a lot of patience to debug.