Lighting the life of women through women safety mobile application“Shakthi”.
Security is a problem everyone faces but for women it’s more than a problem. It́s something they have to live with every day. Advancement in technology means nothing if a woman doesn’t have the freedom of movement. Our team ‘Name_null’ wanted to change that, we wanted to tell the world that women have the right to be where they want to be without having to look back at every step. The Safety of our mothers and sisters is a problem today in Sri Lanka, with sexual predators on the rise and without strict legal laws to prosecute them, the best option we have today is using technology to protect our women.
As a team of four members we analyzed the problem faced by women and came up with the solution in the form of a mobile application named “Shakthi” which resonates women empowerment. Our mobile application is designed to give women the power to protect themselves at the palm of their hands. A simplified mobile application which can suggest in real time the safest path the user can take to reach her destination and alerting authorities and volunteers surrounding the victim in case of emergencies.
For example , If a girl has to get from her house located at Pereira lane to IIT , the path google maps would recommend would be one which uses the shortest possible distance but whether that route is safe , is not known by the user. Our application suggests an alternative path taking into consideration the time while routing a path which would avoid any bars, suspicious bylanes and other dangerous places which have past criminal records.
As a precaution the safest path is recommended to the user but in the rare instance that a threatening situation or incident is about to occur the user has the ability to notify the authorities. The notification is triggered with the “shake to notify “function where the user is expected to shake the phone twice or press SOS to alert the authority and if the situation is in the worst case scenario, the user has the choice to notify the users surrounding a 2m radius location and the nearest police station.
There are so many women safety applications which aim to provide different functionalities to the end users. Most of the applications are focusing on India and very few applications are available to Sri Lankan women. Even then the available applications are mostly focused solely on alerting the authorities using SOS function which might not help a woman who is in a tensed situation. To overcome this void Shakthi exists with a few protocols , it is able to function with “shake to notify” which is quite simple and the user is able to get help from the volunteers who are around her location apart from her family or friend and most importantly our unique safest route functionality.
We decided to present our solution to hackathons and receive feedback from the entrepreneurs and professionals to get a better version of our application. The very first hackathon we presented Shakthi was Hackaholics by University of Colombo school of computing where we were able to get 4th place. Then we participated in codesprint which was organized by the Informatics Institute of Technology and received a runner up. From all the competitions we presented we were able to gain feedback and improve ourselves which led us to get selected for IEEE YESIST 12 Sri Lanka and participated at an international IEEE YESIST 12 competition which was held in Thailand.
We as a team contributed to complete the project successfully. I was incharge of doing the “shake to notify” function and push notification to notify the trusted contacts and volunteers around 2m radius.Apart from the technical knowledge gained I was able to develop interpersonal skills by leading a team , coordinating the team and pitching the project idea in hackathons . project Shakthi is one of the best projects I have worked on and a great success for our team: Name_null.
