OffTheGrid

Inspiration

A region in India has been disconnected from the internet and we thought about a way to help people find their way to locations and find necessary resources.

What it does

Our app is able to: 1) Allow users to interact with Google Maps and receive directions 2) Find the nearest resources such as: food, shelter, medical supplies 3) Diagnose themselves based on gender, age, and symptoms All via SMS so that they can get very useful information offline.

How we built it

We used Twilio API for the SMS. We hosted our service on Google Cloud on a VM instance. We also used the Google Maps API such as Directions and Places to navigate the user. We saved data on MongoDB Atlas in the cloud, and finally we used Symptom Checker to diagnose users given symptoms, age, and gender.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up the cloud instance was new and challenging, especially the security aspect to open up the ports correctly so that we could hook up Twilio with the service. Additionally, we were dealing with new technologies, which added a lot of complexity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We actually got the product to work as intended!

What we learned

We learned how to use the Twilio API, using MongoDB Atlas, the various services provided by GCP, and the Maps API.

What's next for OffTheGrid

Right now when a user wants to diagnose themselves, it needs to match the text word for word. We want to make it more conversational maybe by using Google's DialogFlow.