payAttent!on

We were very inexperienced coming to this hackathon, we have never even heard of android-studio until the hackathon schedule is posted. However, we are set to build an app to learn something new. We struggled to understand the basics and doubted the ideas we came up with as they were too complicated for us. While we were researching for ideas, we were suddenly reminded of personal experience where one of us was crossing the cross-road when a car honked. We did not realize that the green traffic light was already on since we were too preoccupied with our thoughts as well as music blasting in our ear. We quickly realized how dangerous this can be and the results of our research show that 78% of pedestrian accidents around the world are caused by mobile phones.

We were inspired to develop an app where it can vibrate and stops the music (if applicable) when a person is near a cross-road. The app will constantly track the location of the phone and make use of the vectors of the initial position as well as the next position to calculate the distance between next position and the closest crosswalk and if that distance is less than an error bound, then vibrate the phone. Otherwise, take the following position as the next position and repeat the calculation.

We made use of the resources found on Github and adapted a Google Maps API that gives us the longitude, latitude and last updated time of the phone. From there, we slowly build our app using basic math that involves the length of two points.

Some challenges we ran into include not knowing where to start our project. We had the idea but we had trouble implementing it. We strongly believe that was caused by our inexperience and we were unfamiliar with android-studio. Luckily, we had a very talented mentor, Martin Ffrench, who was very patient and helped us build our foundation. Thankful for his enlightenment, we were able to build a simpler version of our original plan. Not only that, we could not obtain an android phone since both of us are iOS users. Therefore, we improvised and made use of the Routes feature in Google Maps as a substitute for a phone moving.

The hackathon was very eventful; building an app was very interesting and tough but we completed it in the end after everything. It was a great experience and it was very cool how we learned something completely foreign and made something out of it in two days! I'm sure that our skills in Android studio will increase over the years.

payAttent!on did not reach its full potential, but I know we could improve it much more such as including the vibrate feature and expanding its user comfort and functionality.