Lighthouse

Inspiration

Dean inspired us. He shared his experience living through frequent earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan and Hawaii. We noticed a critical flaw in emergency alerts, where standard broadcast messages are often vague and lack clear evacuation instructions. In high stress situations, this ambiguity brings panic and hesitation from actions.

What it does

Lighthouse takes the flood of overlapping, often contradictory disaster alerts - sirens, wireless alerts, county pages, news - and reconciles them into one authoritative picture. It then personalizes that guidance to your specific household, like whether you have a car, mobility or medical needs, or pets, and sends you one clear instruction through text. When sources conflict or it can't be sure, it fails safe and tells you to follow official guidance rather than guessing.

How we built it

With love.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating new technology from the sponsors were initially a challenge, especially Poke. We were trying to debug the problem of the messages not being sent to the right number.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we designed for people in real fear, by turning overwhelming emergency noise into calm, personal guidance a family can actually follow. We cared about dignity in a crisis: check-ins that feel human, routes that respect where someone actually is, and updates that speak to you instead of broadcasting the same wall of alerts to everyone. Most of all, we’re proud we built something that treats coordination as a family problem, not just a data problem because getting everyone safe is never only about maps and APIs.

What we learned

We learned that in a disaster, the hardest part isn’t getting information - it’s knowing what you should do with it, when every alert sounds urgent and none of it feels written for your household. Building for Lighthouse showed us how much context changes the answer. We learned that families don’t evacuate as individuals; they need a shared picture of who’s safe, who needs help, and where to go, meaning that coordination is our main product. Finally, we learned that grounding the work in a real scenario made us better builders: when the stakes feel human, you design more carefully, cut what doesn’t help, and obsess over clarity instead of cleverness.

What's next for Lighthouse

We’d pressure-test it with people who understand their location's geography and emergency comms, refine what “move vs. monitor” means for different households, and explore packaging it as a real installable app.