PetGet

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project stemmed from the various ideas on disaster relief. After taking note on previous hackathon solutions as well as other various natural disaster relief applications, we noticed a common ground: every natural disaster mitigation proposal focused on rescuing the people, but nothing on rescuing the animals. This is where our research began, and our findings were stunning. According to California newsletter SF Gate, a small nonprofit called Kincade Fire Pet Rescue Reunification Group has been overseeing the rescue of pets from the recent California wildfires. In order to make their efforts as efficient as possible, they report spending roughly 18 hours a day combing through numerous social media posts, calling missing pet owners, collecting photos, and more in order to even get an idea of where a missing pet may belong. Other similar examples include Hurricane Katrina, where nearly 16,000 pets went missing, and only 15% ever made it home. This is a very preventable problem, and by drawing more attention to the significance of pet loss by creating an innovative solution seemed more than necessary.

What it does

It starts with the owner. If the owner finds their pet is missing due to a natural disaster or any other reason, they would use PetGet to fill out a description of their pet, an image, as well as their last known location. After this form is completed, local law enforcement is notified, and a post to PetGet's website is created. Then, other PetGet users can see the listings of missing pets, sorted by the proximity between the user and the pet's last known location. If someone believes they have found a missing pet, they can look through the local posts and find the pet(s) that best match the description of the pet they found. They would then notify the poster about the finding, and say the pet's current location after the pet was found, whether it be a shelter, a house, a veterinary hospital, etc. The poster would go to this location and claim their pet. The applications of this concept are especially useful for relief agencies/nonprofits, as they can find pets in distress at a much faster rate and they can locate the pet's owner quickly and easily, allowing for more pets to be saved and more owners to be reunited with their pets. Even everyday bystanders or pedestrians can find missing pets, allowing for a broad network of people helping the cause of caring for the pets.

How we built it

We built our website by programming in html and utilizing node.js and mysql.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into was trying to find out how node.js works with html files, as node.js is not website based. Once we figured out how to use the node.js file system, we ran it on the local device, and it ran perfectly. We then deployed it on the gcp app engine, and it was giving an error where an html file could not be found. It took us a while to finally figure out that gcp's node.js is case sensitive, so once we changed a lowercase p to an uppercase p, it all ran normally.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to program our own website using html and connecting it with an effective mysql database.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about the usefulness of environments like node.js and how they work as a server side with mysql.

What's next for PetGet

In terms of what's next, expanding the website to increase user count, adding real time map implementation, connecting with various relief programs to increase pet searches even further...the sky's the limit.