CrowdAlert

CrowdAlert is an interactive platform that utilizes user input, presenting approximate estimations of the degree of people congestion in different areas, alerting users of large crowds in a pandemic.

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Inspiration

We were greatly inspired by the use of innovation to create life-changing services. AirBnB and Uber are two good ideas that we drew deep inspiration from: a good core idea, on top of a non-very technical implementation. The ideas that the two products sent were that good ideas are the foundation of good work, and that technical features can be implemented later.

Enter CrowdAlert, a non-very technical solution to huge global problems. Economic shutdowns and coronavirus infections are plaguing the current world. With CrowdAlert, we seek to restore consumer confidence in doing their everyday business, as well as alert users of any potentially dangerous or large crowds to slow the spread of COVID19.

What it does

CrowdAlert uses user-based input as the data to determine how occupied a place is. Users are able to help the project by saying either the place that they visited was very-occupied, decently-occupied, or near-empty occupation. We originally wanted to use the Google Traffic Congestion API to figure out the congestion in a restaurant, park, etc. because we found out that Google actually calculates congestion based off of GPS signals coming off of phones. The problem was that we could not figure out how to implement this method, but we expect to implement this method in the future by consulting some experts, and when we don’t have a time restriction.

How we built it

CrowdAlert is built using HTML5, CSS, Javascript, and the Google Maps API. We used repl.it to work on the project simultaneously with other group members.

Challenges we ran into

Many of the challenges we ran into were technical. The biggest weakness of our group was that we are not technologically-experienced people. Because of this, we focused on having a great idea that has great effect into changing the world and used simple programming languages (like web development languages) to cut our losses.

As you can see, (literally) all of our problems are technical:

  • Calling back the function to update the website with the user input
  • Storing previously inputted data server-side
  • Recalling storage and exhibiting an approximation
  • Implementing an algorithm that used phone GPS to find if there were a lot of people close to each other in one place
  • Calling certain functions that used the Google Maps API

What we learned:

We learned how to implement the Google Maps Javascript API and the Places API from Google Cloud. Our group were also rookies to web development (or didn’t know web development at all) and we had to take some time to either review web development concepts or learn them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are proud of many things as well. We recognize that technical issues aren’t really our strong-suit so what we plan to do is to do some courses in web development, APIs, and app development to overcome our weaknesses for the next hackathon.

Some of the main concepts and implementations we already figured out for next time are:

  • Managing to make an interactive map using Google Maps API
  • Managing to make the buttons/answer questions/question fields in HTML and having their inputs be inputs for our JS functions

What's next for CrowdAlert:

We have many improvements for CrowdAlert planned. Right now, CrowdAlert is just a great theoretical idea that hasn’t been properly practically implemented. We expect to finish up the backend algorithm; that is priority number one, then we expect to polish the user experience, add Google Cloud translation (so it can be used in non-English speaking countries), add an automatic location using the Google Cloud API, and create a domain name. Afterwards, we hope to port this to a mobile app, because it isn’t practical for an end-user to visit a website for a service; apps are more convenient, quicker, and more organized.

We really value the service that our app provides, so our steps after that are to figure out how to monetize the app so that we don't have to beg our users for donations. One idea is to make a deal with the federal government because our app helps the entire federal economy. In the end, we need our app to survive; too many great world-changing ideas have failed due to a lack of funding so we plan to get creative with this if plan A fails.

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