safely.today

Safely is an app to make sure everyone gets home safely. The truth is, walking home alone can be unsafe and Safely can be your companion. It enables mutual visibility and AI-powered threat detection.

Comment

Inspiration

Have you ever had a night out with friends, and asked the group to “text when you’re home?” How many of your friends forget to?

Usually, they text back the next morning and everything works out in the end. However, what if that’s not the case? These gaps in knowledge of people’s locations and finding out when it’s “too late,” have unfortunately led to unfortunate events for several students after a night out with friends.

Alongside these headlines, research finds that 82% of students feel unsafe walking home in the dark. This shows a problem where walking home leaves you vulnerable.

Moreover, the first 3 minutes are crucial for intervention of crime. Location data is the #1 most valuable type of data to exploit, emphasizing the importance of speed and privacy in these emergency scenarios.

Lastly, friends of missing persons have anecdotally realized they were gone an average of 12-18 hours after they went missing. We wanted to build something for PREVENTION, not REFLECTION.

What it does

Safely is an app designed for mobile devices, where users can join a virtual room and see everyone’s real-time locations to see how they get home. While friends leave for home, the app records interactions and has the ability to automatically contact the group or authorities based on sentiment analysis of their situations. Safely provides AI-powered threat detection and agentic actions including notifying group members and calling the authorities and emergency contacts. Moreover, Safely includes a real-time, opt-in, course-grained location tracking to provide visibility while maintaining privacy using Cloudflare’s workers.

How we built it

We developed the app primarily with Next.js and Flask, with a Cloudflare D1 database. We also implemented a second server using Golang and websockets to provide realtime location updates from our user's mobile phones. We leveraged AI tools including Gemini, AssemblyAI, and Elevenlabs to develop agentic workflows.

Challenges we ran into

Due to our modular architecture and multiple IPs, we found that OAuth2 was not an effective way to implement authorization. We run all infrastructure on lightweight cloud services; on-prem machine learning was not feasible. We used APIs like Gemini and Elevenlabs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud to have used so many diverse technologies together in this project, and orchestrated them together based on our team’s skillsets, interests, and learning goals. Every member of our team covered a different part of the tech stack, but we all communicated together effectively to plug in knowledge gaps and inform each other of how to proceed forward.

Moreover, we were proud of being able to go above and beyond in technical complexity by emphasizing our infrastructure, development experience, and interest in stepping outside our comfort zones. For many of us, this was our most technically complex and diverse project and this is something we are all proud about.

What we learned

We learned How to build a full-stack app concurrently; without needing to pause development of one feature while waiting for another. Cloudflare offers many critical services, even for complex applications and architectures. How to build an agentic voice assistant for use in life-saving situations. How to build a project for the everyday consumer that would benefit them, and making it user-centric to their needs

What's next for safely.today

We were inspired by Infosys’ speech at the opening ceremony, which mentioned an Albert Einstein quote: "Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.” Even though this was just a hackathon project, we personally know those around us in our community would greatly benefit from this project being live. Alongside the features we mentioned in our slide presentations, we had a few things we weren’t able implement in the time provided, including: More secure authorization Decentralized or anonymized data

https://linktr.ee/safely.today

Built With

Share this project:

Updates