Protect my school

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  Protect My School

Inspiration

We've worked in public safety for many years and, with the increase in school shootings, saw Alexa as a natural choice to help our kids stay safe.

What it does

"Protect My School" gives a teacher (or student) a hands-free way to issue alerts, update the office on numbers of students in the class and where any other students might be. 'Alexa tell School Security to start lockdown' or 'Alexa tell School Security there is an intruder on school grounds'.

How we built it

CommandWear is a commercial software application used by first responders and security companies to provide situational awareness and manage incident response. CommandWear exists as a Ruby on Rails application with a defined Rest API. We created an Alexa skill called 'Protect My School' with the required models that allow a teacher or student to say 'Alexa tell School Security to start lockdown' or 'Alexa tell School Security there is an intruder on school property'. Alexa immediately starts essential lock-down processes including initiating an alert notification and status reporting process through the CommandWear system.

Challenges we ran into

As this is one of the first skills we built, it was a challenge to go beyond a basic lambda function and incorporate axios to be able to log into a third party system (CommandWear) and issue an alert.

What's next for Protect my school

Our next goal is to simplify on-boarding most likely using Amazon Alexa for Business to allow a school or school district to easily designate rooms and control what skills are used on the devices.

Built With

• alexa-skills-kit
• amaxon-alexa
• amazon-lamda
• aws-lamda
• axios
• javascript
• lambda