We want to provide peoples with the possibility to report crimes as they are happening or to call for help in emergency scenarios where making a phone call simply is not possible.

Our hack allows users to send a distress signal to the police at the press of a button. The emergency message is routed twice, both via Nexmo sms's and web post requests, in order to guarantee higher reliability of the message delivery and for the system to work even when either carrier may be absent or unreachable.

The police forces will receive the notification of the emergency together with the location of the distress beacon, as well as information about the accuracy of the location, and are able to visualize these informations directly in a web-app map, from where they can coordinate the response.

The sms's sending and receive on the server side are done using the Nexmo API, while the visualization of the locations and accuracy of the emergency locations is done using the ESRI-ARCGIS API.

While it has to be linked with a mobile device like a smart-phone, the emergency system can ideally be triggered by inconspicuous hardware devices such a blue-tooth button, so that it can be activated even in situations where it's not possible to access the phone, for example when being victims of an armed robbery.

Additionally, it could be possible to configure the hack to send periodically tracking updates of the mobile device after the activation of the emergency signal, which could be for example useful to track down a thief.

In future releases, it could also be possible to open an audio channel via phone call for the police to listen into the situation.

Videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-K9YsJbQHM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIfBpdimXFQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GULWpbKZQIw

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