Flood Alarm

Figma
Esri WebGIS Backend Development
Brainstorming session summary chart

Inspiration

Actionable information to people before, during, and after a flood event can make a difference in preventing deaths, economic losses, and human suffering. The project is inspired by our desire to use state-of-the-art ICT technology and available datasets to develop a user (citizen)-centric solution to empower them to make life-saving decisions in case of natural disasters such as floods.

We analyzed the recent floods in western Europe and the consequent significant casualties even in one of the most developed countries in the world to prioritize better communication of actionable information to the people during a crisis situation. In this way, we empower the people to make life-saving choices.

What it does

We take the user (citizen)-focused perspective and develop a mobile app solution entirely based on their needs. For the prototype, we focus on the region of Brandenburg, Germany. The app uses user-location, flood hazard, flood vulnerability, and ongoing crisis datasets, to inform people what the safest location (location of highest elevation) in their vicinity is.

How we built it

We established a team with distinct and complementary skill-sets, held a very important brain-storming session to dissect the problem and understand the need of the people affected by a flood crisis; With this, we scoped our project to develop an android mobile application that uses people’s location data, datasets of flood risk and flood vulnerability and provide people actionable information.

Further, we identified the need to assure people of the safety of their family and loved ones during a crisis situation - to ensure they do not consciously (and maybe unnecessarily) take risky decisions in the likelihood that their loved ones are in mortal peril, and developed a segment that checks on the status of their “group”/loved ones.

For our prototype, we developed an app that looks at the flood risk in Brandenburg, Germany. When a flood forecast is detected, the app gets “activated”. With the user-location data (denoted by a click on the map), the app identifies the highest location in the user vicinity and informs the people that the location is the safest in his/her vicinity.

We made extensive use of user-interface software “FIGMA” to guide our front-end mobile app development in a user-centric approach. For the backend, we used the ESRI web application on javascript to do geospatial analytics. We have also relied heavily on the Huawei location kit and noise classification tool.

Challenges we ran into

The use of different API information, narrowing down our broader outlook to hackathon-timescale achievable goals, integration of different technologies used for frontend, backend development, and GIS analysis

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we could develop a solution in a completely citizen-centric manner.

We made a broader outlook user interface architecture for user app and government/higher-level dashboard.

In the backend, we performed geospatial analytics to get actionable information: tell users what the safest location (location of highest elevation) in their vicinity is.

What we learned

There is a human side to any crisis that needs to be delved deep into while developing any technological solutions

Troubleshooting many technical challenges in a hackathon-timescale

What's next for Flood Alarm

Development of solutions for different key players (government, hospitals, police, etc.) where information interacts with the information received by citizens.

Expand on our broad outlook for the app for the citizen-level interface, providing pre-flood awareness, flood anticipatory information, and actionable and contextually relevant guidance during a flood situation.

Hopefully, scale up the project through an Incubator Program.