Crowd Radar

Inspiration

With the global outbreak of the pandemic, the student community is highly vulnerable if the schools around the world reopen this fall. Sources claim that nearly 100,000 students have tested positive for COVID-19 just across the United States. As students, we just can't wait to get back to school and this inspired us to build this app!

What it does

'Crowd Radar' is a mobile app that can find people and crowded places nearby using geo-location and geo-fencing (thanks to Radar.io's API). One can use our app to stay updated about the number of people at a specific location (Example, cafeteria). The users can avoid going to crowded places and the users who are already inside those places can get alerts if they are under risk.

Apart from this, we have also implemented user metrics. The user will be able to know about the number of people he/she has been in proximity with, on that day.

We've considered user privacy to be the most crucial. The users are anonymized and we do not provide info about a specific user. We do not collect any details from the user except the email (we use email's domain to verify if the person belongs to a specific institution/school)

How we built it

We built the android app using Java on Android studio. The user's location was saved on a real-time database in Firebase. We used the Mapbox SDK for displaying a real-time map from the latitude and longitude coordinates from the firebase. We are thankful to radar.io for helping us with geo-fencing. We created the fences for different places in our college and used the API along with cloud functions to find if a person has entered the fenced area. A counter automatically increments itself when a person enters the fenced area and decrements once the person exits. We've limited the number of people inside a particular fenced area and when the limit exceeds, push notifications are sent to the users.

Challenges we ran into

• Setting up the Mapbox SDK was challenging because we're working with maps inside an app for the first time.
• Connecting the webhooks and deciding the structure of the database also consumed us some time.

We wanted to convey our sincere thanks to the mentors who were available all the time for helping us out...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We are proud of learning to implement geo-fencing with Radar.io.
• All of us were new to each other. We are super proud of building a team-chemistry within a short span of time!

What we learned

• Working with maps in an android app
• Geo-fencing and other radar.io features
• Time management
• Working with a real-time database

What's next for Crowd Radar

We were only able to develop a minimal UI for our app with just a handful of features. Post the hackathon, we look forward to staying in touch and try making a better UI with more features in the user metrics and contact tracing.