Abstract

When people need help with day-to-day tasks they turn to family, friends or neighbours to help them out. Finding someone to help out can be a stressful waste of time. Despite an increasingly networked world, technology falls short in supporting such daily irritations. uHelp provides a platform for building a community of helpful people and supports them in finding help for day-to-day tasks. 
 
We have designed the uHelp app to allow members of a community to request help, volunteer, and complete tasks. As a prototype scenario, we started by focusing on the community of parents who need help with dropping of their children at school, picking them up from school, or babysitting their children. However, we have later expanded the domain and designed a number of other tasks, including looking for someone to substitute you at work, someone to get you your medication when you are sick in bed, along with some other specific tasks as well as a generic one. 
 
What differentiates uHelp from other existing technologies is that uHelp is tailored to the more sensitive and urgent tasks, such as finding someone to pickup your son in an hour. As such, it relies on one's social network, constructed from people's contact lists, to look for trusted volunteers. Finding the appropriate volunteers is based on a flooding algorithm that searches the social network for volunteers based on their trustworthiness and the permitted delegation with respect to the sensitivity of the task in question. Only appropriate and trustworthy people in one's social network are asked for help.
 
Our uHelp app has had its first prototype already implemented at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), Barcelona, and the app is available to the public at the Apple Store and Google Play. 
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Published on 27/12/17
Submitted on 24/10/17

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license

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