Neighbour SOS — Hyperlocal Help Alert App
A one-press alert app that tells the neighbours closest to you that you need help, built for elderly people living alone, with invisible membership and nothing shared until the button is pressed.
Platform
iOS & Android
The Challenge
What Needed Solving
When an elderly person falls at home or gets into difficulty outside, the nearest help is often a neighbour a few doors away who has no way of knowing. Existing community apps are feeds, maps and directories that expose who lives where, and first-responder apps depend on verified volunteers who may be miles away. The product had to reach any nearby neighbour within seconds while keeping every member's name and address unreachable until they chose to ask for help, be usable by people who are not comfortable with phones, and never present itself as a replacement for the emergency services.
Our Solution
How We Solved It
We built a React Native app on the Expo bare workflow around two large buttons: HELP AT HOME sends the registered address, and HELP OUTSIDE sends the phone's live location. A two-second hold and a five-second cancellable countdown guard against accidental presses, and nothing in the emergency path needs typing. All proximity matching runs in Firebase Cloud Functions with the Admin SDK using geohash bounds, and Firestore rules deny any client query against the membership table, so there is no member map, list or count to leak. Neighbours receive a push that rings even on silent, showing who needs help and where, with a Maps link and an I CAN HELP response that tells the sender a neighbour is coming. Members sign in with a verified UK mobile number, can add up to five emergency contacts, and protect their address and account settings behind biometrics or a PIN, which never stands between a user and the help button. App Check, server-side rate limits and abuse reporting keep the network from being spammed, and push notifications are rendered on the server in each recipient's language.
Tech Stack
Results
What We Delivered
2
Buttons, one screen
0
Member maps or directories
12
Languages built in
More Work
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