Inspiration
Due to current pandemic situation, I would often check COVID-19 stats for the nearby counties just to be safe before running any errands. My inspiration for this bot comes from my personal experience. It was obvious that everyone in the world is going through what I was going through. Modern problems need modern solutions. I hope this bot would help people avoid high risk areas and choose a safer route.
What it does
En Route To Safety! helps users into choosing a safer county to shop for groceries, visit hospitals or pharmacies. It takes destination inputs from users and provides COVID-19 stats for the county that the location falls into. It also provides a safer alternative by offering an adjacent county with lesser COVID-19 cases. The bot also allows users to subscribe for daily updates on COVID-19 for any chosen county.
How I built it
The app uses Flask in the backend and is built using Python3 and HTML/CSS
Challenges I ran into
My biggest challenge was time constraint and lack of availability of data. Initially I decided to do this project in Node.js (Express) but I had to denote a lot of time debugging errors so to save me some time, I switched the whole project to Python3. But this was not it, I realized that COVID-19 stats for the US were not available/updated as frequently as other countries. So, I had to invest most of the time into researching reliable COVID-19 data sources.
What I learned
This project was a great experience since this was my first messenger bot. I got the opportunity to understand Node.js and web technologies on a different level and explore Facebook’s Messenger API. It was fun playing with Facebook’s features like Quick Reply, Handover and One-Time Notification.
What's next for En Route To Safety!
Currently, En Route To Safety! is only supported in the US. My immediate goal is to make it available for every country.
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