City Emergency Relief

Meeting people's needs during times of crises.

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Inspiration

After experiencing the recent winter storm, we were all shocked by how much one emergency can impact someone's life. The power outages as a result from extreme weather left millions of Texans in misery as there were problems with wifi, water, and heaters. We wanted to bring awareness to this serious matter. We used it as our motivation to create an all-in-one solution to people's needs during such crises. Our inspiration was enlightened, especially after dealing with the consequences of being unprepared for such emergencies. We created an app to help people reach resources faster and easier, all through the click of a button. We also wanted to emphasize the importance of keeping nature clean, especially during these extreme climates.

What it does

After opening the app and logging in/creating an account, the app allows the user to go to the homepage. The homepage directs the user to shelters, grocery stores, warming centers, garbage tracking, hospitals, items needed and settings. The user can click on any of these options and be directed to a map with locations of these nearby services, their availability, and notifications and alerts on any updates to these resources. This allows our user to get notifications if supplies run out or updates on the next nearest grocery store. It shows capacities of hospitals as well as status' of warming stations. It is an all-in-one visit to find resources during emergencies. Our app also includes a very unique garbage tracking element. As garbage trucks may stop due to inclement weather, it is important for people to dispose their trash safely and cleanly. The map pulls up trash bins nearby, depending on the type of the trash. Even better, for college students, they can earn points on their university ID card by scanning their trash and disposing trash at the designated locations. This helps keep the environment clean, especially during these harsh crises. It reduces litter and keeps surroundings neat.

How we built it

We first designed a prototype for the iOS mobile application in Figma. This prototype included the design, user experience, and contents of each individual page the user would see on the mobile app, and it served as a foundation of development for both the mobile app and the website. We utilized SwiftUI to bring the prototype to life and create a working iOS mobile application. We used the framework, Flask, to effectively combine front-end elements of HTML with back-end elements of Python to develop a functioning website. We used Python to process the username and password information of the registration and log in sections of the website, and HTML to provide the proper text input fields, images, forms, and user experience.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that we faced while making our app was the difficulty of using the same system. Every person in our team had different software that they were working on. Due to the difference in software, it was very hard for everyone to come together and work on the same type of code and see their output without the system giving us errors due to the different software that was used. Other challenges that we faced were, coming across certain points in our app that wouldn't work in practicality. Therefore, fixing those points with new ideas were a challenge as well. One other challenge that we faced was finding software to use to code out the website. It took some time to find a good website where multiple people could edit the code for the website, but we finally reached a conclusion to that challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Accomplishments that we are proud of for this app is that we came up with a full prototype and functional website all in one day. As a team, taking into account that we are all doing this very virtually with our own things to do, we're very proud of the fact that we reached this level of completeness in one day. Other accomplishments that we are proud of are that we all learned different things today to complete this project. We took on the challenge of using software that we are not familiar with but still learned and used what we learned to complete the app.

What we learned

This Hackathon has been a captivating experience that has allowed us to broaden our insights into the applications and various fields of computer science. We were challenged in interesting ways by learning new languages like SwiftUI and HTML. For example, navigating the heirarchy/structure of the seemingly simple HTML language was a lot unlike object oriented programming that we were already familiar with, such as Java. Furthermore, the sudden switch to SwiftUI required immense adaptation in terms of syntax comprehension. In SwiftUI, we had to learn about structs as well as other style elements like background and padding. Ultimately, we came out of this competition with a greater appreciation for the technology that surrounds us as well as an understanding of how important it is in ensuring a bright future!

What's next for City Emergency Relief

City Emergency Relief is just the beginning. From here, we've realized our potentials to produce content that can have a positive impact and remain worthwhile in the long run. Our focus has only sharpened on improving the lives of others by increasing a sense of community and comfort. Future plans could see City Emergency Relief introducing a platform for shuttle buses to reach out to citizens in need and transport them to areas of safety! We also plan to advertise this app and partner with other companies to raise awareness. This could potentially save lives and the possibilities are unbounded.

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