❓ The problem at hand How can people reunite with their belongings easier?
🌱 Where did this stem from? We've all experienced that sinking feeling when realizing a personal item has gone missing. Whether it's a water bottle, backpack, student ID, or laptop, losing something valuable is frustrating and disruptive. Campus lost and found systems are often inefficient, with items piling up in offices, rarely making their way back to their owners. Meanwhile, social media posts about lost items quickly get buried. This widespread problem inspired me to create a solution that effectively bridges the gap between lost items and their rightful owners.
📑 What does Lost do? Lost is a mobile application that streamlines the process of reporting and finding missing items. Users can report lost items with detailed descriptions, images, and last-known locations, as well as register found items with photos and discovery locations. The app features a browsable feed of lost and found items with powerful filtering options by location, category, date, and other attributes. Users can connect directly with finders through an in-app secure messaging system and claim lost items through a verification process that prevents fraudulent claims. The platform also notifies the user when someone has replied to their listing which streamlines the process overall.
🛠️ How does it work? UI/UX Designs: Figma Frontend: React Native Backend/DB: Firebase but for cost sake, async storage is temporarily used.
🩺 Challenges I ran into This was the first time I solo'd a hackathon so balancing time to design and develop was a quite a stressful learning curve.
📈 Accomplishments that I'm proud of I'm proud to have developed a working prototype of this simple idea in just 24 hours. By keeping to strict principles of simplicity and efficiency, I was able to create an application that played to my skills of full stack development.
🍵 What I learned I learned a lot about user flows and building trust within an app community. In Lost, I created a Karma point system that would increase every time someone would successfully reconnect someone with their belongings. This builds trust between the community of app users. I also learned how to put in a robust verification system.
⏭️ What's next for Lost The future roadmap for Lost is exciting and expansive. I plan to implement AI-powered image recognition to automatically suggest item categories and match similar items, reducing manual input and improving match accuracy. Campus-specific implementations with integration to university ID systems and campus maps will make the app even more useful in educational settings. I'm designing a community rewards system to incentivize returning found items, fostering good citizenship. The platform will expand beyond campuses to public spaces like transportation hubs, shopping centers, and parks, serving broader communities. Integration with smart tags and Bluetooth trackers will help prevent items from getting lost in the first place. I'm also developing an analytics dashboard for campus administrators to track lost item trends and improve campus safety. Finally, multilingual support will help us serve diverse communities, making Lost accessible to as many people as possible.