Written Ethics Proposal

Emily Chen, Maruchi Kim, Quinn Z. Shen, Yujun Cho

 

For our E125 project, we will be completing our respective mobile applications for the CITRIS Mobile App Challenge. The mobile app challenge is centered around creating applications for today’s most pressing societal needs such as power consumption, water scarcity, and disaster relief. As such, our respective projects perfectly fulfills the civic engagement criteria for the E125 group project. The rest of the proposal will detail two separate mobile app challenge projects: Project Two Cents by Quinn Z. Shen, Maruchi Kim, and Emily Chen, and Project Mind Your Pills by Yujun Cho.

 

Project Two Cents

Our goal is to create a mobile app which allow users to donate two cents to natural disaster relief or world causes such as poverty, hunger, and water. Sharing the app would be made easy and personal to encourage users to join the cause. Our ultimate vision is to spread philanthropy through everyone’s pocket change.

 

To achieve our mission, we set out by creating a design outline to plan out what our minimal viable product would be in terms of releasing our mobile application. The basic is this: any user with a smart phone could easily and safely donate two cents to any philanthropic cause that he or she finds necessary to provide funding. However one single user on our app will not make much impact on the grand scheme of things. To combat this, we have made sharing very simple and easy, and with a large network of users, daily two cent donations can add up to make a much more meaningful difference. To build up on this point, if one in three Americans were to donate two cents a day to a single cause, two million dollars would be raised and donated to world causes.

 

Project Mind Your Pills

The main objective of this mobile app is to provide a medicine reminder system which also easily gives information at the tip of the finger. This application would allow people to be automous, which would ultimately save resources in the medical community.

 

To accomplish this task, the design is focused on getting feedback from people that rely on medicine daily. The project is currently working with the east bay Alzheimer community to get a strong direction in a simple design. The main features involve a simplified reminding system for all medications a person needs to take along with access to all necessary information for each medication, such as potential steps to take in the incident the user misses a dose. To gain a large user base, the primary focus is to initially target specific communities such as the Alzheimer community and eventually release the project to anyone that has access to a smartphone. The project members envision this application will build more awareness on medication usage and answer frequently asked questions about any medications.

Time and Cost Management

As for time and cost management, both teams have spend 3 hours a week to attend weekly CITRIS workshops, in addition to 2 hours per week dedicated to the development and creation of our respective project.