An offline, voice-guided companion for the moment a family can't reach a hospital in time for delivery.
Built for RevenueCat Shipaton 2026 · Category focus: Peace Prize · Next Gen Award · Design Award
In rural and semi-urban India, transport delays to a hospital are a real, documented contributor to maternal and newborn risk. When labor moves faster than help can arrive, the only person present is often a family member — untrained, frightened, and with no reliable source of calm, accurate guidance.
Catch is built for exactly that moment. It:
- Narrates step-by-step guidance aloud, hands-free, in English, Tamil, or Hindi — because the person using it has their hands full.
- Never teaches anyone to "deliver" a baby. It supports a mother's own labor process and draws a firm line at anything that requires real medical technique — no instructions for pressing on the abdomen, cutting the cord, or handling complications. Where a real problem arises (heavy bleeding, breech presentation, a stalled labor), the app's only instruction is to get real help immediately, by any means.
- Bridges directly to real help: one tap dials India's dedicated maternal/infant ambulance line (102, with 108 as fallback) or a free 24/7 doctor consultation line (104) — and automatically sends the caller's GPS location by SMS to a saved emergency contact.
- Works fully offline. No step, voice output, or control depends on an internet connection.
- Is controllable hands-free: shake once to repeat a step, shake twice to go back, alongside on-screen buttons for the same actions, since a real shake-gesture can misfire under stress.
We checked, seriously, before building this. The underlying first-aid content (WHO, Red Cross, and clinical "Born Before Arrival" guidance) is publicly published and not new. What doesn't exist is a polished, interactive, India-localized app built specifically for the bystander in the actual moment — existing tools either train semi-professional birth attendants (not a random family member in a crisis) or deliberately stop short of giving any delivery-support guidance at all, for understandable liability reasons. Catch fills that specific, narrow gap — content sourced and cross-checked from multiple independent clinical references, not freelanced.
- Support, never technique. The app's role is to keep a bystander calm and informed — never to replace medical judgment.
- Escalate, don't improvise. Any abnormal situation (bleeding, breech, non-responsive newborn, a flagged prior C-section) routes to "get real help by any means," never an invented next step.
- No fabricated features. Every "connect to help" button dials a real, working number — never a placeholder.
- Free core, always. The full emergency guidance flow is permanently free and is never gated behind a subscription, under any circumstance.
- Hands-free Emergency Flow with voice narration, shake controls, and persistent one-tap access to real emergency numbers
- Practice Mode — an identical rehearsal flow with no real calls made, so a family can build familiarity before it's ever needed
- Contraction Timer with logged history and interval averages
- Multiple pregnancy profiles (e.g. for a community health worker tracking several expecting mothers), each with its own emergency contact, hospital, and risk flags
- Tamil and Hindi language support, including full voice narration
- A RevenueCat-powered subscription (Test Store, for hackathon evaluation) unlocking additional languages, unlimited Practice Mode, and multiple profiles — while the safety-critical core stays free permanently
- Expo / React Native, chosen specifically to remain buildable on modest hardware — cloud builds via EAS, no local Android Studio or emulator required
- RevenueCat (
react-native-purchases) for subscription management, using a Test Store configuration for this submission - expo-speech for fully on-device, offline text-to-speech narration
- expo-sensors for shake-gesture detection
- expo-location for GPS-tagged emergency alerts
- AsyncStorage for fully local, offline data persistence — no backend, no account required
git clone [repo URL]
cd catch-app
npm install
npx expo start --dev-client
Note: this project uses react-native-purchases, a native module — running it requires a development build rather than plain Expo Go. See eas.json for the build profile used.
Families in areas where hospital access isn't guaranteed to be timely — a real, large, and often overlooked population. Built with a Tamil Nadu context in mind, and designed to be genuinely usable by someone who has never opened the app before the moment they need it most.
See LICENSE in this repository.