Finally the long awaited Demo Day has been arrived. We were super excited to present our app at the event. Thanks to Code For Pakistan, The World Bank, KPIT Board and Peshawar 2.0 who made this Fellowship program and Demo Day a success. Lets revive our memories from the day we started working on Messiah. Today, we are about to share our story with you guys, on how we came up with this idea, how we took a start and how we made it a success.

Our Journey

Our Journey starts from the Peshawar Civic Hackathon, arranged by the Code For Pakistan in collaboration with The World Bank and KPIT Board. We came up with an idea of a mobile app, which could be able to relay distress signals whenever the user in in danger or needs some kind of urgent help from the nearby people. As we heard of the Hackathon event happening in Peshawar, we participated and developed a working prototype in three days. The judges really loved our idea and our prototype. Long story short, we were among the winning teams when the result was announced. Cool!

The Fellowship program was announced for the winning teams right after the Hackathon. We got selected and our real journey started from there. We wanted to create open-source and free solutions for the government, as well as use any existing open-source tools if required. The reason was to cut down on government spending for paid IT solutions, and to make the code available to everyone in order to promote civic collaboration and coding practices in Pakistan. Having that in mind, we kept everything from our mobile applications to our Website and Blog, completely Open Sourced.

What actually is Messiah?

So now the question arises, what actually is Messiah ? What does it do ? Well, to be honest, Messiah isn’t just an app. Its a Community, its a Family of volunteers who are willing to help anytime, anywhere, no matter what it takes. The features include:

• One Click Help Messenger
• Accident Detection Mode
• Speed Dial System
• The Messiah Community

Help Messenger

Imagine you are in a situation where you need urgent help from the people nearby. Or, you’ve had an accident and you want to notify your loved ones. Don’t worry, we do these things for you. With just a tap of a button, you can seek help from the nearby Messiahs and the volunteers. Incase you’ve had an accident, our Accident Detection Mode will detect it, and will notify your loved ones instantly within just a blink of an eye.

Accident Detection Mode

This is one of the core features of our app. We claim to have the most advance, efficient and elegant accident detection algorithm out there. Our algorithm includes fetching the raw data from all the sensors of your smartphone, passing it through the Sensor Fusion algorithm, and then refining and processing it further and detect intelligently, whether or not, the accident has happened or not.

The Messiah Community

If you are a volunteer, and love to help others which satisfies you the most, then you can join our community, and you can be the Messiah for others. You just have to download our app and register yourself. We would verify you and after the verification process, you’d become the official member of the Messiah Community.

PDMA version of our app

We actually built two versions of the app. One for the community and one for the PDMA, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority. We build a survey tool for them, a tool which automates the whole process, including the verification of the places affected by the natural disasters and the affectees with just a few taps. Back then, a person who is affected by some kind of natural disaster would write a letter to the PDMA office or give them a visit to register his damage so that government could help him in rehabilitation. After that, PDMA would send a field worker to the Affectees place who would then verify the disaster, go back and fill out some fisky files and add all the records, which probably take months. We have automated this whole process of verification, registering and recuperation of the affectees damage. The process is simple, if you are an affectee, just launch our app and with a single SMS, the field worker would be sent to your place. He’d then verify the natural disaster and again, with the tap of a button, he’d be able to register the whole event and the affectee would then be given some help in the form of cash for the rehabilitation process. Simple enough !

Presentation:

Below is the visual representation of the whole story described above. Feel free to comment below. We would love to hear from you.