RescueBeacon

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  Shortest distance between Help and Person is Distress!

Inspiration

We were inspired by the floods that occurred in Mumbai this summer and were amazed by the power of people to help one another during the time of disaster. This motivated us to build a platform where people can connect with each other in times of need.

What it does

We built a service that sends out a rescue beacon using one of the most common networking platforms in the form of twitter. The people who have signed up to be volunteers/professionals on this platform are matched according to the feasibility with which they can reach the person that requested help and they can choose to respond to their call upon which a message is sent to the person in distress that help is on the way.

How we built it

We created a signup application for the volunteer/professionals and their details are stored in the database. They can sign in and view the people in distress. We created a streaming filter for Twitter with the #HACKPSUHELPLINE tag and the location is shared with the rescuers on a google map. The rescuers can then choose the nearest person to help and the application will provide the shortest path to their desired location.

Challenges we ran into

Convincing one of the teammates to use the Git client instead of Git command line. Also, setting up port forwarding on Google Cloud to host a Flask server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a clean codebase which can be used for multiple applications in the future and developing a web application with pragmatic use cases which can be put into production with minor tweaks.

What we learned

Teammates can be hard to deal with sometimes, they can destroy codebases, be unproductive for hours, but in the end, these altercations develop into ideas and propel the project onward.

What's next for RescueBeacon

• Implement adverse conditions such as weather, terrain, and roads in suggesting paths to rescue operators.
• Specialties assignment to rescue operators.

Built With

• css
• flask
• gcp
• html
• javascript
• jinja
• make
• python
• sqlalchemy
• sqlite
• tweepy