DisasterVision

DisasterVision is a community app that notifies users to disasters including wildfires, car accidents and floods. It lets users report incidents instantly helping save lives in the Tri-Valley region.

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Submission to Track 3 : Beginner Friendly

Inspiration

** Our Inspiration for DisasterVision **

The delay in disaster warnings is growing due to new governmental laws and regulations that make it harder to receive timely news on when disasters occur. This can cost billions of dollars of money and harm thousands of lives. One such example to illustrate this is when governmental systems failed to warn users of the firestorms in Los Angeles, leading to about 18 deaths as a result of this. To address this pressing issue in our society, we have developed a crowdsourcing initiative that will provide public residents in the Tri-Valley region with important information, which can significantly impact their daily lives.

What it does

** What DisasterVision Does **

DisasterVision is a program that is primarily designed to serve 2 features. The first feature is that it gives users a database to alert when some other user reports a wildfire, car accident, or Flood in real-time. What this means is that we have enabled the user to click around on the screen for 3 disasters, as aforementioned, and see what reports others have mentioned. Additionally, we have enabled users to report these 3 disasters if they ever encounter it in the Tri-Valley region by making reporting forms for all 3 disasters. The user can report the severity, time of disaster and additional details as well. Additionally, DisasterVision tracks the users location and integrates it into the report for disasters when given to additional users.

How we built it

*How Anay and Sidhak Built DisasterVision *

We built DisasterVision by using a community based approach in order for users to let each other know about disasters through our app. We decided to build 3 primary things, an About Me Page which would state our names and passions, a generalization page for the wildfires, floods, and car accidents which displays reporting info, and finally, the reporting form for all 3 components. We also used a mathematical trig formula to predict where the wildfire disaster will be going and integrated the trig formula into our app. More specifically, the mathematical trig formula is this:. Finally, we also used global variables and TinyDB in order to import the dictionary that was saved into the User’s reporting form onto the users generalization page as well.

Challenges we ran into

** Team-Related + Coding Challenges for DisasterVision **

We unfortunately ran into a lot of challenges when building this program, but we tackled them and resolved it. The first challenge that we had to face was a communication challenge where we unfortunately could not meet together to develop the project since we both lived 100+ miles away from each other. In order to resolve this, we decided to primarily use a Discord channel of communication. Additionally, one technical challenge that we ran into was deriving and effectively applying a formula that can calculate the spread of major natural disasters. In order to resolve this, we implemented a system (Trig Formula) that would calculate and predict where the disaster was going, such as South towards Dublin. Another Technical challenge that we ran into during DisasterVision is that of the interconnection between multiple screens in our program in order to show the user’s wildfire reporting form onto the generalization page. In order to solve this, we implemented global variables in our program that would allow us to import the dictionary in the reporting form onto the generalization page.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

** DisasterVision Accomplishments **

We are proud of our exposure to advanced mathematical concepts, which is relative to longitude and latitude. More specifically, we managed to incorporate trig functions such as sine and cosine into our program, allowing us to see the integration of mathematics into coding firsthand. Thus, our eloquent UI designs and efficient programming of DisasterVision instilled feelings of positivity among our group since this was our first hackathon project.

What we learned

** What Anay and Sidhak Learned From DisasterVision **

We learned to derive some comprehensive mathematical formulas involving trigonometry. This played an imperative role in shaping our development process of analyzing the scale of impact, which is based on natural disasters, which featured floods and fires, for our app. Additionally, we learned how to work together in a long-distance using channels such as Discord and to plan and manage our time effectively. Additionally, we learned some efficient brainstorming strategies to instantiate our progress without compromising efficiency. Finally, we learned about some new components in MIT App Inventor, such as the trig functions, the TinyDB Component, and overall expanded our knowledge in MIT App Inventor.

Whats next

** What’s next for DisasterVision **

As a program which was developing with the utilization MIT App Inventor, DisasterVision plans to embark on its vision of bring awareness to natural disasters and car accidents with the utilization of versatile and agile back-end languages such as Python. Additionally, we plan to add more features (i.e. the rate of a disaster and area accumulation of a disaster) with the utilization of derivatives and integrals. Thus, we plan to make our UI more eloquent with the utilization of versatile and efficient front-end languages such as HTML 5 in order to do so.

We want to be judged in Track 3

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