Quake Alert Pebble App

Inspiration

Recently there have been several major earthquakes in the world. Just in 2015 some notable ones were in Nepal in April and Chile in September, while in some places such as Japan major earthquakes are pretty frequent. We were personally inspired to create this app as our families were affected by the Nepal Quake and one of the major problem of the aftermath was communication and information on earthquake magnitude and location in close to real-time. We based this app on pebble watches, to allow people to quickly receive news on their watch and respond with a single shake triggered response menu.

What it does

This app pushes data from a reliable earthquake data website: http://earthquake.usgs.gov. Then it displays the latest information for a certain selected location to the user on the pebble watch. With a single shake motion after receiving this message, the user can update his loved ones with his quick status. As well as receive updates from loved ones through built-in supporting app platforms such as email, sms, google hangouts and facebook.

How I built it

This was our first experience developing an app for pebble and also learning and using JavaScript. We referred guides at http://developer.getpebble.com to get started. We used cloudpebble to build the watchface and watchapp. We pushed data from websites and displayed selected ones on the screen. We then allow use the watch's Accelerometer information that detect a shake/jerk by the user. This shake/jerk triggers a quick response menu to show up allowing the user to respond to loved ones with a quick status update message sent via the supporting apps linked with pebble.

Challenges I ran into

This was an extremely new platform as well as language we had to learn from scratch. Debugging was difficult using cloudpebble and we hope this can be improved in the future.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Learning basic javascript and being able to start with a super cool project using pebble watches. Getting a chance to create an app for Pebble that has is highly useful for earthquakes and natural disasters based relief support and safety updates.

What I learned

Javascript, Pebble Development, etc

What's next for Quake Alert Pebble App

Integrating with direct status update to facebook. Adding and a regular background ping whenever movement is detected in the user. The background ping showing location and cumulative movement information can be allowed to be requested by loved ( preselected) on an hourly update basis and it can run in the background without requiring user input. If an emergency situation such as being trapped in rubble in earthquake arises, less movement will be detected and loved ones will receive a ping showing that and will be able to respond quickly to rescue. Even though our prototype is based on earthquake, this can be customized for other natural disasters that require information dissemination, status response and safety pings.

Built With

• javascript
• pebble
• pebble-cloud