Safe Zone

Zap your worries away and plan your trip with confidence!

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Inspiration

In light of the covid-19 pandemic, the idea of being in public itself is its own risk. This is due to how highly contagious the Covid-19 disease is. Being in close proximity to other people automatically puts you at risk for contracting the virus, since there is no way of knowing who has it or not. It becomes a particularly more dangerous situation when crowding occurs. In a city like New York, where crowds are sometimes inevitable, the risk is more real compared to other places.

Solution

Our app provides users with the information they need to plan their trips according to busy and quiet hours for certain establishments (Test Centers, Restaurants, Stores, Churches ). By providing users with a list of the busy/quiet hours typical for specific locations, it will help them to better prepare and plan their visits. For example, they have the information at hand to select any of the quiet times to visit an establishment. Likewise, they will know beforehand if they are visiting an establishment during busy hours and will be able to better prepare (e.g. ensuring that they do not forget masks and hand sanitizers before leaving their homes). This app will help users to plan their trips or outings with more confidence.

Theme

Nontraditional methods to deliver care in a COVID-19 landscape

What it does

Safe-Zone is currently a concept app we have designed with mock-up data that shows the busy and quiet hours for certain restaurants, covid-19 test centers, stores and churches in the city of New York which was very hard-hit by the covid-19 pandemic.

How we built it

We approached this project by first brainstorming the idea. Once the idea was finalized, we divided the UI, API and potential database work amongst our team members. One team member, Aastha, was working in IST zone. The other team member, Kai-Ann, was working in EDT zone. Priya helped in analyzing which tool to use for collaboration among Jira and github. We collaborated with each other on a regular basis to discuss the progress using Slack and Google meet-ups. We used the Agile methodology with the GitHub Projects planning tool for keeping track of our tasks and progress. One person built the UI using Flutter. The other person explored the APIs and built the JSON files required to showcase the data in the UI. We were also able to configure and initialize the Firebase Firestore database (Real-time database) in Flutter. This ensures that our app is also back-end ready. We are proud of successfully collaborating with each other on this project despite being in different time-zones (EDT and IST). In addition, we are happy that we learned how to position Widgets in Flutter because it allowed us to develop a better UI.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Working in different time zones (IST vs. EDT).

  2. Taking time out of hectic office/work schedules while also working overnight to complete the project.

  3. API Challenges : Difficulty sourcing an API that measures crowd data in Real Time so that we can show crowd statistics for any given location at any time. Google maps popular times is not available in their API unfortunately. Another solution we found called BestTime API was subscription-based and so we we decided against using it at the time. Building the JSON data was tedious because it involved a qualitative comparison of popular times for each place. Even though we used mock-up data, the data points themselves are accurate.

  4. Learning and exploring new technology like Flutter and figuring out the widgets for our App design. Understanding Firebase integration (issues with compiling DEX files) and Google Map API integration. Using JSON data in Flutter.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first mobile app we have built. We also used Flutter for the first time which itself is the biggest achievement. Now we can build mobile apps using Flutter and Firebase. We have successfully built an app to help people and is a noteworthy contribution to society during such tough Covid times.

What we learned

We learnt UI design, back-end modelling and developed a MVP in record time. We chose Flutter as it is the latest technology which enables one to build the mobile app with fastest turn-around time. We were amazed at how creating a good design for a mobile App with good UX is so much easier than before using the Flutter framework. We are very proud of our achievement and thank Girls In Tech for organizing this Hackathon. We also thank DevPost for providing us with such an amazing platform including the slack tool for collaboration.

What's next for Safe Zone

Implement BestTime API to make this app production-ready in near future. Currently, we are using JSON files to populate the data and have Firebase as a back-end service. Once the BestTime API is implemented, we can expand and store collections in the database. We can also implement SignUp and Login methods (using Firebase OAuth) so that we can store unique data pertaining to our users. This will assist with future data analytics and insights into our app usage.

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