Designed by Stivale for HackCWRU 2022 CareCoin is an app that rounds up your daily transactions and donates them to health research and charities to create better healthcare in developing countries.
Aima Alakhume, Angela Qui, Mario Manalu, Nora Chamseddin
Healthcare in the world's 125 developing countries is often poor or missing. And organizing fundraisers for these nonprofits can be expensive and time-consuming. This is where you can help!
With CareCoin you can help donate money by having your daily transactions rounded up and donated to your chosen health-related charities. This allows for an average person to donate money in an easy and effective way while creating a positive impact in the world.
For people who want to create a positive impact in the health and medical world, CareCoin is an app that rounds up your daily transactions and donates them to local health research and charities to create better healthcare in developing countries such as Haiti, India, Paraguay, Kenya, Columbia, and the Philippines. CareCoin gives nonprofits and research-based charities in developing countries a platform to connect with donors and update them on their progress and accomplishments. At the same time, CareCoin makes it easy and simple for people to donate and explore charities related to the medical world.
To use CareCoin, one may simply follow these steps:
- Make an account on CareCoin.
- Link your debit/credit card to your CareCoin account
- Select the health-related charities or research that interests you and would like to help fund/donate to. CareCoin will then round up your purchases and donate the amount at the end of the month to the chosen charities.
- You can track how much is being rounded for each purchase.
- And keep track of how you are helping by reading about new research and news in the explore section.
Our front-end prototype and user interface were created with Figma, allowing us to preview user interactions and flows with the app.
For most of our full-stack coding, we used Python — on object-oriented programming language that structures the software program into simple, reusable pieces. CareCoin’s user experience was designed with Kivy, which is an open-source Python GUI framework that runs on both Android and iOS — making it perfect for mobile app development.
Moving to the back-end, we used a NoSQL database known as Google Firebase; it offers a swift and smooth integration for the amateur backend developer.
It was tasking trying to learn about different APIs and how they could be integrated into our application. We had to consider ways to ensure transactions occur safely and user information remains encrypted.
We were also faced with the challenge of learning SQL — a programming language new to all of us. After extensive research, we discovered a NoSQL database platform that was user-friendly and easy to integrate into our code.
We are proud that we were able to create a full-stack product that does not only look appealing to users but also has an incredible mission in improving healthcare and disease research in developing countries. We are happy that we were able to work well and maximize the limited time we had in the hackathon by leveraging the time differences that our teammates had. Some of us are also first-time hackers so it was a fun experience to create a product from brainstorming to coding to prototyping to pitching.
We learned how to use new technologies this weekend, front-end and back-end. We also learned how to maximize the team dynamics and time given.
Although we are extremely proud of the progress we made for CareCoin this weekend, we hope to further our app's impact by increasing the medical charities and foundations to include more developing countries in the future. We also hope to run user tests to improve the user experience of our app accordingly.