Paula Fernández, Lucía Adrián, Nuria Villoria, Sandra Caamaño and Lucía Fernández are aged between 15 and 16 years old. At their high school in Móstoles, Madrid, a teacher assigned the students to develop a useful project for their communities, so they could participate in the international Technovation Challenge competition, which seeks to empower young girls to become leaders and problem solvers as technology entrepreneurs. The five teenage girls developed an application to make women feel safer when they go out on their own. It is called When&Where.
The app spots the user’s location in real time. It can be used with a previously established route (the “Take Me To” mode) or without a fixed destination (Start). The app detects if there is any anomaly, if the user does not reach her destination, if an emergency occurs. It then asks the user if she is okay. If she does not answer or says no, the app automatically calls the emergency contacts that are registered in it or it calls the emergency services (in Spain 112).
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So, if something happens to the user her location is not lost. But the app only sends the location to contacts in case of emergency, so privacy is assured, as the creators said in an interview with the television program Madrid Directo. The application also uses a mapping system that cannot be hacked.
The background events that led the five teenagers to create this project were the various disappearances in Spain of young women like them, which resulted in their rapes and murders. There were two high-profile cases that encouraged them to develop the application: Laura Luermo and Diana Quer were both kidnapped, raped and killed, in 2018 and 2016.
“Our main objective was to create an application that could provide us with security on a daily basis. We wanted to develop an application that could provide security for our generation and future generations and try to create a community where you can go out into the street for a run, a walk or do whatever you want without any risk”, Sandra Caamaño explained on Madrid Directo.
The five teenagers created their own company, LPSN, as the initials of their first names. The team did the programming, the design and the business plan of the app.
In June this year they were notified that they had reached the finals of the Technovation Challenge. They traveled to San Francisco in August and ended up sharing a third place with six other finalists, among more than 2,000 participants.
The app is free and is available for android mobile devices. It can be downloaded from Google Play. It will soon be available for iOS.
Until September this year, when the five young girls spoke with El País’ Julia Cadenas, When&Where had already had more than 5 thousand downloads.
The same month, they released the Spanish version of the app.
Paula Fernández, Lucía Adrián, Nuria Villoria, Sandra Caamaño and Lucía Fernández do not talk much about the future. They prefer to go with the flow with this project, as they said in a radio interview with La Ser. For the time being, they all want to go to university in a few years.