Mobile app empowers citizens in Puerto Rico to keep communities safe
INVID is a software development and consulting services provider working with clients in the Caribbean and the United States. Our name stands for Internet Vision Development and we help our clients use leading-edge technology to solve their most important challenges.
Recently we’ve focused on using mobile technology and the cloud to address public safety issues and help make cities and communities safer. Our first safety product was Social Alert, a free mobile app that integrates with users’ social media accounts, including Facebook and Twitter. If people find themselves in a dangerous or threatening situation—such as a potential crime or a medical emergency—they press a button on the screen of their mobile device that broadcasts a message to their followers on social media. The message includes their location via the GPS coordinates of the device. This product caught the attention of local media, and we had 80,000 downloads of Social Alert in the first few weeks after launch.
Social Alert can be customized to meet the specific needs of a city, community, or school. Our first community-based project was in November 2014 with Taller Salud, a nonprofit organization in the town of Loíza on the northeast coast of Puerto Rico. Taller Salud runs a violence prevention program and was looking for a technology solution that could help its staff respond to and mediate potentially violent situations and other emergencies in the community.
Our customized app for Loíza is named Acuerdo de Paz (Peace Agreement). When citizens encounter a dangerous situation and push the button in the app, it sends an alert directly to the organization’s mediation staff, who can see the user’s location on a digital map and respond directly to help remedy the crisis. Residents of Loíza have reported that the app gives them a sense of security, and Taller Salud staff have found it useful as a communication channel for mediation assistance and for promoting their message of peace.
We performed a similar customization of Social Alert for the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao (UPRH). The school wanted to reduce crime on campus and bring its security policies into compliance with the Jeanne Clery Act, which specifies that certain security measures must be in place for the school to receive federal funding. We created a new version of the app called UPRH Alert: it sends notifications to the campus security office, which has an online portal displaying a campus map, so staff can see immediately where the alert is coming from. UPRH security officers also monitor the portal remotely from tablets that they carry on campus, so they can respond to alerts in three minutes or less.
Following our successes at Loíza and UPRH, we are now working on customizing the app to meet the needs of other public safety organizations.
Because of the potentially serious situations that users of our apps may face, and because the apps may transmit sensitive information, we needed to build them with technology that is reliable, available, and highly secure. We chose the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, which offers a level of security that is trusted by numerous healthcare, government, and banking customers. It was clearly the best option for us, and our clients have been very happy with it.
Read the full case story about the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao here.
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