Inspired by Ivan Gayton from Médecins Sans Frontières at Hack4Good 0.5.
PROBLEM: When organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières and other NGOs arrive in a country that needs humanitarian aid it is chaos! Teams of people in their hundreds arrive with thousands of tonnes of supplies to distribute but the problem is knowing which areas are high priority; areas that have no clean drinking water for example need to be quickly identified. Often the best approach is to hire a helicopter and fly over in order to assess priority. But as you can imagine helicopters are not always available or take time to arrange and it is not an ideal use of a resource that could be dropping aid.
SOLUTION: A brilliant inexpensive solution is to fly an unmanned micro helicopter aka drone with a camera to capture aerial photographs and a tiny computer to capture coordinate data about where these pictures are being taken. This equipment costing less than £400 is ultra-portable and has the power to provide mission critical data. These budget devices have already been trialled successfully however the photographs and the coordinate-file need to be manually cross referenced to understand where the picture was taken and then manually transcribed onto a map.
WHAT WE BUILT: We built a program to automate this; a web app to enable the NGO to rapidly flick through the photos see where on a map the picture was taken and use keystrokes to annotate the map with the priority of that location so they can deploy the appropriate team. The web app server can be installed on a laptop without an Internet connection.
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