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  the dashboard of our app

Project story

It started with a practical problem — and became a philosophical one.

In construction sites, farms, and factories across hot-climate regions, workers face heat stress every summer. The obvious solution is automation: detect the temperature, fire off a message, done. Two problems stopped us immediately.

Problem 1 — the connectivity gap

Most field workers carry basic smartphones. They have WhatsApp and Telegram, but they don't have reliable mobile data for a browser dashboard. We looked at SMS APIs — Twilio, Vonage, Africa's Talking — every one requires payment, even at trial scale. Telegram is free, unlimited, and already installed on virtually every smartphone in our target regions. So Telegram became our messaging layer.

Problem 2 — why we deliberately didn't automate

The obvious next step was: "Now just automate it — if temperature exceeds 40°C, send the alert automatically." We almost built that. Then we thought about what actually happens in the real world.

In most countries, a site manager has a legal duty of care toward their workers. When a worker suffers heat stroke, the first question from a labor inspector is: "Did the manager know about the conditions, and what did they do?"

An automated system creates a defense — "the system sent alerts" — but also a liability — "the system sent alerts and you ignored them." More importantly, it removes the human judgment that safety law is specifically designed to enforce.

There is another dimension: the workers themselves. If a worker feels unwell and wants to stop, they need a formal channel — not just walking off the job, which can be contested later. The "OK" check-in reply is not just a convenience feature. It is a timestamped record that a specific worker acknowledged a specific alert at a specific time. That record protects a worker in a dispute just as much as it protects a manager.

So we made the send button manual — deliberately. The manager looks at the dashboard, sees a Red risk level, makes the decision, and clicks. That click is a legal act. The alert is a document. The reply is a receipt.

Heat Stress Manager is not an automation tool. It is a compliance tool that happens to use a weather API and a chat bot.

Built With

• css
• mysql
• open-meteo-api
• php
• react
• telegram-bot-api