Angelica

A companion app to help victims of domestic violence.

Domestic violence or KDRT in Indonesian is defined as an act of violence physically or mentally to the victim by aggression among people with kinship. The victim in the family could be anyone such as children, women, men, or the elderly. Domestic violence issues can range from minor impact like humiliation to concerning impact such as sexual abusement (Holt, 2008). In reality, it doesn't matter if it's only small things like humiliation, it still gives a bad impact to the victim and it won’t guarantee it will not escalate to the next level. In the end the victim will be left with posttraumatic stress and insecurity that could be carried for the rest of their life.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in some countries conducting lockdown for their citizens, there has been an increase of reports on domestic violence. For example, there has been an increase of 40% in reported domestic violence in Brazil (Bradbury-Jones, 2020). This incident happens because citizens need to battle the pandemic, which in turn isolates them alongside their abusers, increasing the frequency of experiencing domestic violence (Kofman, 2020). A big concern is when the victims become reluctant or unable to show evidence when reporting the acts of violence that have befallen them.

Our proposed solution, as to be our project, is a device that would be capable of discreetly collecting evidence of domestic violence by way of audio and video recording. In order to minimize misuse of the device and save storage space, it will only start recording and storing the evidence if it detects the signs of domestic violence. The microphone will act as a sensor for audio queues where an AI will be used to determine if the sounds that it picks up is associated with domestic violence. If it does, the camera will be turned on and record the whole situation. The camera will also be equipped with an AI that can detect objects that it sees as to provide additional evidence. All recordings will be stored in cloud storage and the device itself will only store the latest recordings if it does not have enough space.

In this group project, my role was in developing the frontend, CI/CD, and setting up the cloud environment, connections, and security.