Team 55_Parking Heroes

Inspiration

Four NTU CS students put their heads together to figure out how they can better involve their fellow residents to care for the flats they call home.

Two decades of living in the heartlands has taught them that the most valuable lease they owned was the relationships they had with their neighbours.

We leverage this source of power to deliver a crowdsourced, gamified system to engage residents, alleviate HDB’s manpower crunch, and assist HDB in pursuing their Designing for Life roadmap in this IOT age.

After intensive research on the topic, we realised that there were already many solutions on the market that tackle our chosen problem statement. This led us to ponder, why would this problem statement surface if the existing solutions were effective? Hence, we dug deeper and come up with solutions that we felt could enhance the current available parking apps and OneService. We tackled issues such as user adoption, manpower efficiency and sustainability.

What it does

ParkingHeroes is an app built for the community, run by the community. Parking heroes main feature is to utilise the power of many to elevate the conditions of shared spaces, more notably carparks. It is also able to identify similar and repeated problems and solve them from the root, adopting both prevention and cure in our solution.

ParkingHeroes relies heavily on the community and fosters strong community spirit to make the shared environment space, such as carparks, better through a collective effort. ParkingHeroes encourages users to be active and remain active on the app through heavy gamification and referrals to engage users to use the app with their family and friends. The rewards feature also acts as a little treat to incentivise users to continue doing their part for the community.

How we built it

Developing apps for connectivity requires a mobile-first paradigm, and so Flutter made the most sense given our resource constraints. This is connected to Firebase, a batteries-included noSQL database for the cloud to allow us to skip on backend development and hit the ground running.

Challenges we ran into

One key challenge we faced was in thinking about how to prevent bad actors from having their way. A system without moderation inevitably decays into misuse, but too much moderation would defeat the purpose of this app.

Striking that balance was not easy, but we believe we’ve made an appropriate final decision with the jury system in our presentation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Connecting to Google Maps API via Google OAuth tokens set through environment secret variables

What we learned

Important to plan the UI design before going into coding the application otherwise we may risk backtracking our progress.

What's next for Team 55_Parking Heroes

Having a full equipment list API
Speed up the backend by setting up Flask for our OpenCV and using a backend-frontend API communicator like GraphQL.
Smoother UI transitions
Extend the app to not only just carparks, but also to other shared community spaces as well