When someone makes the decision to travel to a new country, they find themselves in an unknown environment and struggling to perform fundamental, everyday tasks.  This could easily be avoided if they had better access to basic information or immigration experts, but obtaining this help is often very difficult.  To help deal with this issue we developed S.O.S. Latino.

S.O.S. Latino is an application designed for Latin American immigrants who encounter difficult situations in select U.S. cities and does not require an internet connection.  The goal of the app is to provide information on different topics like health care, immigration, NGOs, geographical information and basic English expressions. 

 Each topic, once selected, provides both general information and information tailored to the city the user has selected.

Here is an overview of the information that can be found through our application:

·         Health care: Information about hospitals in the city that speak Spanish and home remedies to ease certain conditions.

·         Immigration: Information on migratory rights within the state, consulates in the selected city, and nearby NGO's that make an effort to help people in need.

·         Location:  Four different maps are available, none of which require an internet connection. These maps give basic information about local streets, public transportation routes (either bus or metro) and zones inside the city that have reported higher crime rates and are considered unsafe.   

·         Language: A small, basic translation dictionary of the most commonly used words and phrases translated in both English and Spanish. The purpose of this translation dictionary is to allow them to read commonly used words or to ask for help or information.

All the information described above is downloaded with the application.  The application does not need an active internet connection or data plan after installation, so you always have access to it at all times on your android device for when you need this simple but vital information.

Right now, S.O.S. Latino contains information for the cities Los Angeles and San Francisco, but we plan to add more high-immigration U.S. cities. To avoid the application growing too large because of all the offline functionality we provide, we intend to publish a different application for each state. Our current working app is S.O.S Latino California Edition. This way we can provide a smaller app with only the information that our user really needs.

We developed our application to run on Android version 2.3 or later.  This allows us to reach 98.3% of all Android devices out there[1].  This is especially important since many immigrants will be using a simple device, most of which run version 2.3. 

TECHNICAL INFO