New app Lamapp is designed to protect witnesses to and victims of domestic abuse

In November, a social experiment involving a woman apparently being abused in a lift went viral. Conducted by Swedish organisation STHLM Panda, which makes videos about social issues, it was designed to assess the reaction of people witnessing abuse.

Shockingly, of the 53 people who saw the violence, only one intervened.

The results of the experiment revealed the deep-rooted psychological and legal dilemmas eyewitnesses face when it comes to reporting abuse.

It also became the starting point for 22-year-old Heba Mahmoud Nayef, a computer-science student at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, to develop LamApp, a smartphone application that allows you to report abuse anonymously to authorities and sends a distress call to contacts.

Nayef worked on this innovative app with team members Artaza Aziz and Jawed Jandali Refai, and it recently won the World Citizenship category in the Pan Arab semi-finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup.

The students will present an updated prototype at the finals of the competition, in Seattle next month, where they stand to win US$50,000 (Dh183,647) and meet Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft.

Original article by Afshan Ahmed

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New app Lamapp is designed to protect witnesses to and victims of domestic abuse