ProximityPals

We all struggle with loneliness in this day and age where we are infatuated with our mobile devices. We aim to provide meaningful face to face connections with those around us with similar interests.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the large population of people who feel lonely and/or have poor mental health. Very frequently on the UC Davis Reddit there are posts about people who are feeling lonely and are looking for friends to do things with face to face. But, this issue is much more widespread than Davis. This is a worldwide issue. We want people to always feel like they have riends to turn to so they never feel lonely.

What it does

It connects people who share similar interests by proximity and having them meet face to face so they can put their phones down and have real, meaningful conversations with people. The app looks for other devices that are closeby, and if there are other devices close by it will check if the users of those devices share similar interests, passions, and hobbies. If so, the app will send notifications to these people encouraging them to meet up. We also set up a temporary in-app chatroom for the users to talk briefly to schedule a meetup.

How I built it

The frontend was made using the Flutter framework, and its purpose is to get the user's information, as well as to retrieve the information of their potential friends around them. If there is a match, we send this to our backend which is built in Flask. Our backend then correlates the users' interests from the database, which is hosted by Firebase. If the users share interests, and therefore are compatible, we push notifications to the users' mobile devices containing potential topics they could talk about, as well as the other user's contact information. We also have a "Connections" tab that shows the users' recent connections as well as the interests they matched with.

Challenges I ran into

Nobody on our team had any experience with Flutter or Dart. We originally tried to use Google App Engine, but that had implementation issues, so we switched to hosting on our own server. We faced challenges in connecting the layers of abstraction of our stack.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

By the end of the 24 hour period, we had a working proof of concept and a {Minimum Viable Product}. We feel like we accomplished most of what we set out to do at the beginning, which is a very satisfying feeling.

What I learned

We all learned how to use various technologies that we were not familiar with before. Furthermore, we learned how to build something that we can be proud of in a short amount of time.

What's next for ProximityPals

Next, we will work on scalability, optimizations, and feature sets. For scalability, we wish to connect with more people in the area without overwhelming our users with information, while respecting people's privacy. We also wish to migrate to Google App Engine to give us effortless scalability. For optimizations, we wish to optimize our frontend, as well as the business logic behind finding other people within proximity..

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