Fatal error: Call to a member function query() on null

First, you declared $db outside the function. If you want to use it inside the function, you should put this at the begining of your function code:

global $db;

And I guess, when you wrote:

if($result->num_rows){
        return (mysqli_result($query, 0) == 1) ? true : false;

what you really wanted was:

if ($result->num_rows==1) { return true; } else { return false; }