Closecall
Women Security Application · Final Year Project · 2020
Overview
Cases of sexual harassment and violance towards women has been increasing at a fast and worrying rate throughout the years and today all women’s safety are being jeopadised in ways such as sexual harassment, rape and other various types of exploitation.
With that, we have created an app called “CloseCall”. The goal of this Android app is to conceivably reduce the difficulty of calling for help from trusted sources in a state of panic.
Hypothesis
Women want an easier way to call for help in a dangerous situation from trusted sources such as law enforcement and family members.
The Problem
“”How might women avoid sexual harassment and violent encounters and overcome the normalcy of women living in constant fear of these encounters on a daily basis?”
As we are all aware, there are various issues that arises with the context of women’s safety. These are a few reasons that motivated us to develop this application. The “Me Too” movement is significant in a sense that not only encouraged us as a team in creating a mobile application against sexual harassment, r*pe and sexual abuse. This movement carries the purpose of supporting survivors of various types of abuse and violence and to also end sexual violence. “Stop Street Harassment” carried out a study on sexual harassment and assault within the United States. In 2019, an updated report was released, and the results were obtained through survey. In this survey, 1182 males and 1037 females participated in his survey. According to the figure below, it is found that 81% of females have experienced all forms of sexual harassment and assault. This includes physical harassment, being physically followed and verbal sexual harassment (2019).
The continuum is broad and large, with one end harbouring the likelihood of things being more aggressive with physical assault or rape. In a study from the Middle East and North Africa, between 40% to 60% of women have experienced street-based sexual harassment, such as sexual comments, stalking, following or staring. Moreover, this study has found that 31% to 64% of men have admitted having carried out those actions towards women (Promundo and UN Women 2017). Rachel Jewkes, the director of the What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls global program has said that rape is an extreme consequence of sexual harassment and that currently, sexual harassment has become a part of daily life of a woman, especially in public (Senthilingam 2017). All in all, there are several accounts and researches from all over the world and through the course of time that proves that women are constantly in danger of sexual harassment and violence
Research
Understanding the target users
Before research can begin, it’s crucial to not only identify the targeted user but to also understand what kind of features are expected of the proposed application. A survey is created as a part of this research in terms of a solution towards the proposed issue which is the act of violence towards females especially in public.
- Demographics
84.4% of respondents were ages 20 and below. 62.5% of respondents were females. - Situation & Environment
We can conclude that the majority of females in comparison to males do not feel safe in public, especially when alone and at night. - The Women Safety App
The majority of respondents agree that the proposed features will be useful in times of trouble.
Competitor Analysis
In order to identify the functions, features and layout of the application, we carried out a comparison of existing similar apps that include security for women as an objective.
- BSafe: Users can create their own safety network and send SOS alerts to the group. Users can display their location when an emergency signal is sent by pressing the button or saying a keyword.
- Shake2Safety: Allows users to send text messaged to emergency contacts, share pictures with location and record audio in emergency situations by shaking the phone or pressing the power button 4 times.
- Chilla: After being triggered, the app will send an SMS with the location and automatically places a call even without interet connection.
- Sister: Works like a family locator where user can assign trusted contacts to share your location with them. Users can locate the fastest and safest way on a journey and also nearby police stations.
Outcomes
We wanted Closecall to seem inviting and clean as it is crucial for users to navigate through the UI with ease. The font and colours were carefully picked in order to optimise clarity and simplicity. The name Closecall was born during one of our brainstorm sessions during the early stages of this project. We decided on the name as it instills the purpose of the app by just its name and of course, it’s really catchy.
Second, we crated a design system that fully aligns with we wanted the app to feel like to its users and it gives us a sense of direction as we continue on the journey of this project. If changes in the UI needed to be made, the design system keeps us in track and in check.
Registration Process
When the user first install Closecall, a welcome page will prompted, displaying the app’s logo and tagline and two buttons that allows users to either log in or register for a new account.
Once the user enters the registration process, a page is prompted for enabling the app’s access to the user’s phone’s microphone and the user’s location separately, accompanied by an explanation to why the app would need to gain access to those.
The app would need to gain access to the user’s phone’s microphone to allow one of Closecall’s features where the user will be able to send a customised message via SMS through voice input.
As for the location of the user, this is to enable one of Closecall’s features which is to detect the user’s location so that it could be sent out to the user’s trusted contacts and notify other users that are within the user’s area in a time of emergency.
The registration process is divided into two parts. The user would need to enter their phone number, so that the app is able to send messages via SMS from the user’s phone number. Also, the user would need to enter their email to act as a second medium to connect and interact with each user registered within the app.
Home
Users will be able to immediately access an “emergency button” to activate emergency mode so that the app will be able to take the necessary actions. This is one of the several ways the app is able to switch to emergency mode.
During this, the app will automatically contact the user’s set trusted contacts within the app, through SMS and phone call. Other users that are nearby the area where a user has gone into a state of emergency will be notified as well.
The interface is fairly simple as the app should focus on it’s functions and making it easy for users to access those functions. Having a cluttered interface might decrease the app’s capability to perform well.
Contacts
Users are able to set trusted contacts with a limit of four contacts to ensure the app’s maximum performance and to ease the process during the emergency mode.
The name, phone number and a picture are listed for each contact respectively. If the user were to edit any of the contact’s information, they would tap on the edit icon, represented by an icon of a pencil. If the user were to add a new contact, they would tap on the Floating Action Button (FAB) situated on the bottom right corner.
Location
One of the targeted features of Closecall is a GPS function where the user’s location can be detected. This is to ensure that during in times of an emergency, other users around the area will be notified as well.
Users will be able to view other users, displayed as pins, on the map. If a user is in danger and the app goes into emergency mode, the pin’s colour will turn red to indicate the user is in danger to other users.
Conclusion
Though the completion of the prototype was a success as it was able to coincide with the aims and the objectives of the intended project, my team and I were faced with many issues during the development stage and given the time period set to complete the Final Year Project, we were unable to complete the development of the application.
All in all, we can conclude that the concept of the application is visible yet not all the objectives of this project were successfully met as there are some bugs that still exist within the app. Thus, it prevents us from fulfilling the third and fourth objective due to it’s related geolocation issues.
Existing issues:
- Permission for phone and sms does not appear, needs to be done manually.
- Location tracker irresponsive, location marker does not appear according to user’s location.
- SMS does not include current location of user (geolocation related issue).
From this project, we were able to acquire a deeper knowledge of mobile application and its unlimited capabilities, such as speech recognition. We have also learnt how there are more women facing sexual harassment everyday. We plan to improve this project by fixing the existing issues and extend its features such as a shake gesture to activate the emergency features and a feature where the camera is activated automatically during an emergency.
