check24 Car Assistant

Your personal Driving Assitant

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Inspiration

The app is aimed at helping drivers in emergency situations like in the event of an accident. The app also lets the user track his driving behavior and upload the data to insurance provider to get some kind of rewards for good driving.

What it does

  • Detect accidents from the accelerometer.
  • Offer support during accidents like messaging a set of predefined contacts
  • Allows the user to gather information (Photos, Videos, Audio, Witness Contacts & Witness Accounts) at the scene of the accident so that it can later be provided to the Police / Insurance

How we built it

  • We use the MIT App Inventor to ensure fast prototyping
  • Many features like sensor data are easily accessible
  • We also used Firebase to store data, allowing us to create multi client applications with Firebase's change notification
  • The DropBox API was used to store photos & other data to the cloud for easy sharing
  • OpenStreetsMapsAPi was used to get the speed limit at a particular location to cross check against the users current speed

Challenges we ran into

  • Although MIT App Inventor allows quick prototyping, it comes with the downside that not that a developer usually is able to do with a proper Android SDK can be done (Layouting for exaxmple).
  • The Max Speed data provides by OSM are only for specific locations and many times it fails to return a proper value.
  • Time was very less as the amount of features we wanted to implement would have taken significant time

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We were able to grasp MIT App Inventor and found out its the goto tool for Android prototyping
  • Concepts like using the accelerometer to properly detect the G forces
  • Trying to compare driving habits with ideal behavior

What we learned

  • MIT App Inventor and found out its the goto tool for Android prototyping although it still needs some work
  • Using firebase to the extent where we handle the change notifications from the DB
  • The use of mapping APIs like OSM and their limitations
  • Storage APIs like Dropbox API and their limitations

What's next for check24 Car Assistant

  • We still do not have all the features we intended for, so we would like to finish up with the app
  • Depending the availability of better APIs for location metadat and other things we can improve the app even further
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