Ping | Devpost

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Inspiration

Ping was inspired by personal experiences trying to contact friends and relatives after natural disasters. We wanted to help victims of natural disasters get word out to their friends and family -- even if the cell network has gone down.

What it does

Ping is an app that uses Bluetooth to spread information around a P2P network. Whenever you come into contact with another ping user, it copies a short blurb containing your information and status to their phone and does the same for yours. As you travel around a disaster zone, you accumulate location and time stamped information on the well-being of the people you come in to contact with. When anyone in the network connects to the internet, the information they collected is uploaded to a central server which alerts loved ones and rescue workers who is safe and who isn't. In this way, our application exploits the connection between people to enable more victims to contact the outside world more quickly after a disaster.

How we built it

The application is built primarily in Swift with the central database hosted on Amazon Web Services.

Challenges we ran into

Interfacing between the iOS application and AWS proved to be surprisingly difficult. Parallel development and testing in Swift also prove to be more challenging than we expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our idea and all the research that went in to it. I'm overjoyed with effort our team put in to the project and the final product that we got out of it.

What we learned

Natural disasters are a major issue that we believe can be mitigated by the creative use of new technology. While we believe we made progress on one facet of the problem, there's still much work to be done.

What's next for Ping

Our next steps are to implement many of stretch features, such as back-propagation through the network (to let a user know that their message was received), automatic notifications for friends and family, and connecting the service with the SMS Mesh network.