Below is 3 pages of our final app design. First is the Home screen, then our Beacons page (Beacons are your selected contacts to message), lastly is the emergency page that will be shown after holding the button for 3 seconds.
Pictures of final cuff:
Poster Design:
Sirena is a fashion-forward cuff with the aim to prevent sexual assault by connecting women on college campuses with their social circles and local authorities. The idea behind Sirena is that if the wearer feels uncomfortable or unsafe, they would be able to press on the circular button on the top of the bracelet for 3 seconds and the bracelet would connect to the Sirena App on the phone and send a pre-set message saying you feel unsafe and also disclose your location. The bracelet will vibrate once you send out the distress signal so you know that it got sent, and you would also feel a vibration in the bracelet when someone responds they are coming to help. However, since both Keegan and I don’t have much experience with coding and creating an app, the functionality isn’t fully functioning at this point. We still believe in the idea and would love for it to eventually work how we envisioned it to, but we have a ways to go before that can happen.
As a whole, I would say we are pretty pleased with what we were able to come up with in the time period that we had to work on it, but obviously would have wished to have it functioning even better. We spent a good amount of time working on both the coding and design of the bracelet. The coding part, which Keegan worked on was very complicated and was what required most of the time and attention to so Keegan definitely spent more time on that than Emma did on the design of the bracelet as well as the poster. The design definitely didn’t meet Emma’s vision but that is mostly due to the limited resources we had with the technology needed.
Our original project goals were to be able to work together and have a fun and new learning experience working on something we both strongly believe in. When we look at it like that, I definitely think that we achieved those goals. However, we did hope for more function regarding our final project description and that was just too far out of our reach for now. We hope to continue to work on Sirena so we can eventually have it fully functional as to have the potential to not only help keep women safe, but also help the local police force have a better idea of where women feel most unsafe with our data and put up more street lights, promote SAFEwalk more, or station more officers in danger areas.
Some of the largest hurdles Keegan encountered had to do with the coding of the bracelet and connected phone application. Approaching something like creating an app without any previous experience was definitely an ambitious task, but in the end, what he was able to come up with is definitely something to be proud of. Emma had a couple of challenges with designing the bracelet itself. At first she wanted to sew it together with either leather or neoprene, but due to the hard and bulky technology, had to learn how to create a 3D model so it could be 3D printed. She originally started out making prints using TinkerCad, but moved on to sketchup and then ended up using NX for the final bracelet. After making a couple of prints using TinkerCad and sketchup, the prints were all separate and not the right size or fit so we moved on and Keegan was able to help her create the design using NX. The design after using NX was much better and Keegan was very instrumental in that process. The final design although was functional, could definitely use some adjustments. The button didn’t work seamlessly which was very frustrating. Also, for the future, Emma would like to have the technology engineered by possibly printing our own circuit boards to be much smaller so the bracelet could be more attractive and easier to manipulate for a more pleasing aesthetic and feel.
If we had more time, we would like to have been able to print another bracelet with tapered sides to improve the aesthetic and add some kind of design to the exterior of the bracelet. In terms of tech and functionality next steps would be to first get to send an email/text through the Simblee, this may not be possible and would require a different app development process to happen. Keegan worked with Ionic, an online app development site, for a couple weeks and found the content at a much higher level than his current coding knowledge, but Ionic did have far more applications than the Simblee mobile app alone. So, for long term growth and potential to bring Sirena to market the two of us would look to bring on someone with experience in app development to help improve our functionality.
Using a large cuff right now to have an idea of what the prototype could look like.
