Breaking Barriers: Venn Team’s Story in Building App for Pediatrics-disability

Published in

Generation Girl

8 min readSep 13, 2023

Hi! This is Venn!

We are Vanessa Chans, Esther Vemberly, and Natasha Grace from BINUS University’s Computer Science department. We’re currently on break before beginning the fifth semester. We are currently trying to occupy our vacation time by participating in computer science competitions, short courses, and projects.

Behind the Team

We initially heard about HackHERthon on Generation Girl’s Instagram and have been eager to participate in this challenge since April. We are particularly interested in GenG’s programs because the group is dedicated to supporting women in technology #womeninstem (yay!). As students concerned with how technology may assist individuals with disabilities, the issue presented in this HackHERthon resonates with us. Furthermore, we are on vacation and looking for enjoyable activities. Why not give it a try?

Two of our members have previously participated in GenG’s programs. Esther attended Summer Club in 2021. She built a personal website, and her final creation was recognized as one of the best. Vanessa also took part in GenG’s Summer Club Explorer in 2022, namely the Data Science class. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot from GenG’s seminars, which piqued our interest in HackHERthon.

Our Hackathon Journey

Venn is the name of our squad. Venn is an abbreviation for our first names, Vanessa, Esther, and Natasha. First, we looked into a difficulty that was relevant to the competition subject. Because of the large number of sexual assault cases, we became particularly interested in sexual education for special needs children. Children with special needs are also more exposed to sexual violence since they are sometimes dependent on the attacker. Then, utilizing online meetings, we all brainstorm solutions. We discovered that the most significant way to avoid sexual assault is to teach children early and frequently.

Esther played the hustler, preparing the pitch deck and editing the film. She made certain that we told our stories effectively. Natasha and Vanessa played hipster and hacker, respectively. They created the app prototype in Figma and built it in SAP Build. Natasha concentrated on the education component, creating an interactive module to assist children in learning about their bodies. Vanessa concentrated on the reporting function. She ensured that victims who utilize our app can easily report the occurrence. Throughout the process, we assist one another and share our greatest app development ideas.

We learned a lot about special needs children and sexual education while researching the topic. We were also given the opportunity to brainstorm any possible solutions to the problem we discovered. We also discovered a slew of intriguing articles and horrifying sexual assault cases, which served as the foundation for our answer.

Aside from that, we learnt how to use SAP Build to create a mobile app without writing any code. It is faster and easier to code the app than learning a new framework. SAP Build is also making it easier for non-technologists to create desktop/mobile apps. We also had the opportunity to meet our mentor, who assisted us in improving our ideas and video. She also offered her expertise working in SAP, which is valuable for individuals just starting out.

First, we came up with the name ASAP for our app. ASAP stands for Assistance Against Sexual Assault for People with Disabilities. We discovered that both of the topics provided (Disability and UMKM/Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises) are extremely relevant to the current situation when we first learned about HackHERthon, but as we discussed it further, we decided to focus on helping children with intellectual disabilities, as they are more vulnerable to becoming victims of sexual assault. A research conducted in University in Michigan found out that 90% of all people with developmental disability will experience sexual assault at some point during their lives.

There was one case in particular that reinforced our decision, in which an intellectually-disabled fifteen-year-old girl in West Jakarta was deceived and raped by three individuals. She was kidnapped and found a day later. The more we learn about this issue, the more astonished, saddened, and terrified we become at how many people with disabilities have been sexually abused. We believed that this was an urgent situation that required a solution that prioritized persons with disabilities in order to help prevent and, if necessary, support the victims, who were usually youngsters and teenagers. Refer to our suggestion for a more complete explanation of our findings in ASAP proposal.

ASAP can also be an abbreviation for as soon as possible, which suggests that we must provide youngsters with sexual education as soon as feasible. We use a smoke illustration for our logo (smoke implies asap in Indonesian).

We encountered various difficulties during the development process. We must investigate the topic quickly while also developing a solution. There are relatively few educational resources available for special needs youngsters interested in learning about their bodies and sexuality.

We also encountered some technical challenges at first because we were unfamiliar with SAP Build. Some of our feature suggestions are also not supported by SAP Build, therefore we are unable to integrate them. However, we may solve the issues by assisting one another and reviewing the SAP Build manual.

After deeper research, here are the summarized version of the problems that we plan to solve through ASAP:

Lack of awareness about sexual assault or sexual education, especially among children as some people still considered it as ‘taboo’.
Limited access to sexual education resources, especially for people with learning disabilities
Victim dependence on perpetrators, such as family members complicating the victim’s ability to seek help
Lack of consistent communication from victims impacting legal proceedings

After that, we focused on visualizing the solution by creating the prototype using Figma, which you can access here.

This process also made us easier to create the actual application using SAP Build during the HackHERthon duration.

ASAP ultimately has two main features:

Educating

We came up with an idea of making sexual education fun and easy to understand through gamification features, with visual and audio to aid them after reading a research that stated children with intellectual disability will be able to learn faster and memorize longer if various media and sensory (speaking, listening, seeing and sensing) as well as text with the concept of storytelling are used. The main topics are body ownership, private parts, inappropriate gestures, refusal and reporting, but we are looking to expand to a more structured curriculum. Each lesson is wrapped with stories and illustrations such as body anatomy, flashcards, and multiple choices that are easy to comprehend. These courses are also equipped with various media and senses such as speaking, listening, seeing, and sensing. These interactions allow users to test their understandability in an engaging way. Users can also track their progress and collect fun badges!

Reporting

We also found out only 18% of sexual assault cases are reported and handled legally, which is why we create this feature, to support and offer help to the victims who are confused on how to report their experience. The reports will be forwarded and handled by UPTD PPA (Unit Pelaksana Teknis Daerah Perlindungan Perempuan dan Anak) by Ministry Of Women Empowerment And Child Protection (Kementerian Pemberdayaan Perempuan dan Perlindungan Anak Republik Indonesia). Through this feature, users can choose either to call the services directly (the app provides prompts on what to say as they might be confused), or fill a simple form where they can also choose to record their voice if they have any trouble in typing.

Interesting Projects in HackHERthon!

We were quite amazed by the range of concepts given! The initiatives of other teams greatly broadened our perspective on the difficulties that individuals with disabilities and small businesses face, as well as the imaginative solutions to those problems! Here are some noteworthy initiatives that we believe are both distinctive and interesting:

Team Vazor’s Signify — This application caught our attention with its’ eye-pleasing user interface and useful features. Signify enables deaf and mute people to interact with non-deaf people, and vice versa. Besides the translation feature, the app can also be used as a sign language learning platform.
Team Ateam’s WPBI Communication — This one is so cool since the camera can detect and directly translate sign language! Also able to translate from written language to sign language.
Team Athena’s TechnoToon — This plugin is very unique, as it can customize a webpage according to the person’s needs, especially for people with dyslexia, partial color blindness, ADHD, low vision, and many more. It also offers speech-to-text and audio enhancement!
Team Arc’s D’JobSpot — The design is really clean and user-friendly. The idea of creating a platform for individuals with disabilities to apply for jobs really resonates with reality, as it is challenging for disabled people to get a job, mainly because of the false stigma surrounding them.

Thank you, HackHERthon!

What distinguishes HackHERthon from other contests is that we are given a mentor to coach us through the competition as well as the opportunity to present our idea to the world in the form of a film. We received a lot of great feedback from the general public, and some of them asked fascinating questions about our app.

Overall, we enjoyed the HackHERthon and were excited throughout the entire phase. We were also aggressively seeking comments from our mentor. Kak Stacia, our mentor, was gracious and supportive of our efforts to improve our concept and implementation. Even though we were not chosen as finalists, we are pleased with our performance and eager to grow.

We like collaborating with one another. This is our second competition together, and we aim to keep pushing ourselves in the future. Cheers to many adventures ahead!