Disaster Preparedness Assessment

Inspiration

Disaster checklists always seemed rather daunting, consisting of pages of information to keep track of. This in turn discourages people from preparing for disasters more thoroughly. Hence, we decided to make an app that allows you to show how prepared one is for a disaster, as well as offer tips on how to better improve their chances.

What it does

The Disaster Preparedness Assessment functions similarly to a survey, where it features several questions that a person answers. These questions are divided into four categories: Disaster (what kind/how intense), Shelter (what kind), People (who is in the shelter, pets included), and Supplies (what is in the shelter). Once responses are given, the model processes them and produces a score of 1 to 5 for how well suited the shelter and supplies are, a general summary of the answers, given and tips to improve.

How we built it

Python for the main code, Streamlit to make the website, and watsonx.ai to analyze answers and give helpful tips.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges included making sure the scoring was fair and made sense, getting the AI to give good, helpful advice, and keeping the survey interesting and not too long

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Made disaster prep less scary and easier to understand. Created a simple scoring system that tells you what to improve. Got the AI working well to give personal advice. Made the website easy to use. Made preparing for disasters feel more like a game than a chore.

What we learned

How important it is to make things user-friendly How to use AI in a website How to break big problems into smaller, manageable steps How to make survey questions better through testing How to keep users interested while getting important information