SafeLink

Inspiration

My family is originally Nigerian, but I have aunties, uncles, and cousins living in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Every hurricane season, we see the same cycle happen: the storm hits, the internet dies, cell towers collapse, and suddenly nobody knows who is safe, who needs help, or where the danger is.

Last year, one of my relatives’ neighborhoods in Jamaica lost all communication for hours during flooding. They weren’t hurt, but they were completely cut off. No calls. No texts. No updates. They had to physically walk around to check on neighbors.

It hit me that people don’t suffer because help doesn’t exist—they suffer because they can’t reach it. That’s when SafeLink became more than a project idea. It became a challenge:

How do you keep a community connected when the entire communication system falls apart?

This wasn’t about copying an existing idea. It was about solving a real problem that affects real people I care about.

What it does

SafeLink is a disaster communication network that works completely offline. No towers. No data. No Wi-Fi. Just phones talking to phones.

In simple terms: If you send a help request, your phone passes it to the nearest phone. That phone passes it to another, and another, until it reaches someone who can assist.

SafeLink provides:

Offline SOS messaging
AI that detects if a request is critical, moderate, or low
Volunteer dashboard with distance, location, and ETA
Offline map navigation to guide helpers to the person
Relief feed for food, shelter, and medical needs
Full anonymity and AES-256 encryption

It turns any group of phones into a self-healing rescue network.

How we built it

We engineered SafeLink to work exactly where normal technology dies.

Core components:

React Native for a simple, civilian-friendly app
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) + Wi-Fi Direct for offline peer-to-peer connections
AI priority classifier using TensorFlow Lite
Custom mesh router that chooses the fastest relay path
Offline GPS + cached map tiles for routing rescuers
AES-256 encryption for secure SOS messages
Store-and-forward delivery for messages even if peers temporarily disconnect

We didn’t just build an app. We built a multi-layer communication system designed for real emergencies.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into real engineering problems that forced us to innovate:

Phones kept dropping in and out of range
BLE device names were unreliable
Multi-hop message delivery was unpredictable
GPS routing offline had to be rebuilt from scratch
AI classification had to run without internet
Everything needed to stay fast and simple enough for someone in panic

These weren’t classroom problems—they were real-world constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Second place out of 59 teams and 329 students at the BeSmart Hackathon
Built a functioning offline mesh network from scratch
Designed a real rescue workflow from SOS → AI triage → routing → arrival
Created an interface simple enough for civilians in crisis
Demonstrated that an entire community can stay connected without any telecom infrastructure

But the biggest accomplishment is that our system could genuinely help people in disaster-prone places like Jamaica, Nigeria, Haiti, and rural America.