KIMinder360 Mobile App

Problem

Modern society shows a growing need for situational awareness, with people constantly being distracted by their phones in public and often paying no attention to their surroundings. Lacking situational awareness presents a threat to general safety and emergency preparedness. This is because during emergencies like natural disasters, accidents, or security threats, quick observation and decision-making can mean the difference between life and death. Moreover, it erodes everyday resilience, social connectivity, and mental sharpness, leaving people unprepared for real-world challenges and contributing to broader societal issues like increased crime victimization or reduced community cohesion. Enhancing situational awareness is crucial not only for individual empowerment and emergency readiness but also for fostering a more mindful, proactive society.

Our client, Morgan Boatman, noticed this issue and attempted to solve it with a gamified experience called KIMinder360 which revolved around sending short tasks called directives that encouraged people to be more aware. However, this implementation was entirely manual and lacked automation, severely limiting its effectiveness and reach. These directives, designed to train situational awareness, such as "Identify three exits in this building," were distributed personally via direct contact with Morgan to small groups. This approach suffered from inefficiencies like time-consuming manual distribution, the absence of randomization or scheduling, no centralized progress tracking, and linear scalability challenges, where each new participant would result in a larger workload. As a result, the training remained inaccessible to a wider audience, dependent on Morgan's direct involvement, which prevented it from properly solving the larger awareness issue we are facing.

Solution

KIMinder360 is a mobile application that transforms smartphones from sources of distraction into tools for building situational awareness through automated, personalized micro-training exercises. The KIMinder360 app handles all aspects of situational awareness improvement, as well as providing user customization to allow each person to curate their own training experience. By delivering randomized directives via push notifications within user-defined "Action Windows" (customizable time slots), the app encourages active environmental observation and preparedness in daily life, directly combating modern inattentiveness. Users can select preferred categories (emergency preparedness, navigation, fitness), adjust difficulty and engagement levels, and track progress through an intuitive dashboard, fostering consistent habits that enhance safety, resilience, and readiness for emergencies, ultimately reducing vulnerability and promoting a more attentive society.

To address the limitations of the manual predecessor, KIMinder360 fully automates directive creation, distribution, and tracking using a local Room database for offline storage and Android's notification system for spontaneous prompts, eliminating the need for Morgan's direct involvement. This enables seamless scalability to a global audience, incorporates gamification for sustained engagement, supports user-generated directives for personalization, and includes optional cloud integration via Firebase for community sharing. By streamlining workflows, the app saves the sponsor significant time on coordination (potentially hours per participant weekly), boosts accessibility beyond small groups, and ensures reliable data analytics, turning an inefficient, manual process into a self-sustaining, impactful digital platform.

High Level Requirements

Otherwise known as domain-level requirements, these serve as overarching goals for the project that must be fulfilled to consider our mission complete. At a high level, the KIMinder360 application must serve as a self-guided, mobile-based awareness training platform that transforms real-world situational awareness tasks into interactive mini-challenges known as “directives”. The following domain-level requirements define the essential system capabilities from a user perspective. Each domain-level requirement is then elaborated through specific functional, performance, and environmental requirements.

• Automated Situational Awareness Training: The app must provide users with automated, randomized directives to strengthen situational awareness and readiness through push notifications within user-defined time windows.

• User Customization and Scheduling: Users must have the ability to control when and how often directives are received through customizable Action Windows and frequency settings.

• Directive Management and Data Handling: KIMinder360 must maintain a secure, local database of directives that supports storage, retrieval, categorization, and user-generated submissions.

• Safety, Privacy, and Legal Compliance: The app must include a legal disclaimer and follow best practices for safety and moderation to protect users from risk and liability while maintaining offline usability.

• Scalability and Future Growth: The system should be designed with a modular architecture to allow future integration with cloud databases, monetization features, and community submissions without disrupting the core offline functionality.