Buoy is an application for accompanying and supporting new mothers in their most sensitive and vulnerable time after birth with the help of experienced mothers and grandmothers. The application offers a secured chat between mothers and trained volunteers that they can approach with questions and dilemmas in specific domains such as: nutrition, sleep, mother and baby relations and more. The volunteers are experienced and have been trained by Hava Clinic in Shiba Hospital

The chat offers a secured and pleasant environment for the new mothers. There is a history page and an option to mark the volunteer in a saved list. Beyond the chat, Buoy offers a tips page that provides complementary content for the new mothers to access and find podcasts, videos, articles, etc. The content is customized for each mother and answers exactly the needs and problems she wants to solve or receive assistance regarding them.

How does it work?

The application is coded in Java on the Android Studio IDE. Using OTP authentication, each unique user is added to a Firebase users database. We have a separate database of volunteers that syncs with the application using the availability times of the volunteers. The messages are transferred between the volunteer and the new mother, while they are being saved in the Firebase database in a unique folder of those two women. Those messages appear simultaneously to both users on the chat page and constantly on the history page that is also updated in real time.