Coronavirus Inspires UMD Grads To Create App For Volunteers

COLLEGE PARK, MD — Omer Yampel and Yuval Reiss, two graduate students at University of Maryland in College Park, have developed an app called Helpful Hands, which aims to connect people stuck at home with volunteers who want to run errands for them.

The idea for Helpful Hands originated when the roommates discussed Yampel's parents, who live nearby in Rockville.

"They were taking care of a friend who is immunocompromised, dropping off groceries, doing anything that he needed so he wouldn't have to go outside," Reiss said.

Yampel and Reiss noticed that many grassroots organizations were putting together Google Sheets as a way to assemble information within the community about people who needed help during to the coronavirus pandemic.

"We thought that creating an app would be very helpful for a few reasons," Reiss said. "It's a little more dynamic. You can still search based on all kinds data points, whether you want to do more grocery errands or [location], in addition to the whole chat functionalities, where you can talk back and forth with whoever you're helping in order to see that you're meeting their needs or the product they want is the one you're getting."

To use Helping Hands, a person downloads the app and creates a profile. At that point, they can sign up as either a volunteer or requester.

"If you're signing up as a volunteer, you get more questions that you have to answer, basically preferences of locations, what kinds of requests would you like to do, do you have a valid drivers license," Reiss said.

Yampel and Reiss are working with Apple in implementing a more stringent background checking system for their app.

"We're not personally, one-on-one screening each volunteer that we're signing up," Reiss said. "We're relying on the system we have in place to flag any volunteer who has a history or something suspicious."

The person requesting help signs on and answers questions about where they live and what types of errands they need done, such as picking up groceries or walking a dog.

As soon as a request is posted, it goes to a page where volunteers can see all of the requests near them, and then they can decide which requesters they want to help.

"The requester can look at the volunteer's profile and they can accept the offer of help," Reiss said. "From there, the volunteer can go out and do the errand."

Helping Hands includes a chat feature, which allows the volunteer and requester to stay in contact throughout the errand. They can use that to share instructions or schedule a drop-off, if the volunteer is picking up groceries or a prescription.

According to Reiss, the app does not have a pay function, so the volunteer and requester must work out whether the items being picked up will be paid for ahead of time or a reimbursement is necessary.

"There was a lot of talk about that when we developed the app," Reiss said. "At this point, we decided to leave it to the volunteer and the requester to finalize that agreement."

The app includes a task feature that prompts the two parities to discuss repayment before an agreement has been made to do the errand.

"We assume that every volunteer who's picking up groceries or a prescription is not being compensated for transportation," Reiss said. "But for the groceries and stuff, that's left up to both the requester and volunteer."

Helping Hands is still in the beta phase, according to Reiss, so not a lot of people have signed up to volunteer as of yet. The two roommates are waiting for Apple to approve their build and then they'll begin marketing the app more fully.

"Except for more bug fixes and testing things, there hasn't been a complete user base yet," Reiss said. "You can download it now on Android on Google Play, but we haven't been marketing beyond friends and family on LinkedIn or Facebook."

While full implementation may take a while, Yampel and Reiss see a future for Helping Hands beyond coronavirus pandemic.

"We see it continuing a lot longer," Reiss said. "There's still going to be immunocompromised people in the future and we do think this could serve this community after the virus."

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