Inspiration
Hundreds of millions of Americans are under lockdown, and with the number of new cases slowly dropping day by day, the possibility of reopening society becomes more and more of a reality. However, the big question remains — when will it be safe to venture out of the safety of your own home? One of our team members asked this question when his mother refused to let him go buy groceries from a nearby store. “What if the employees don’t wear gloves or masks? How can we be sure that the store is clean? What if you bump into someone who has COVID-19?”, she asked. His mother isn’t the only one who shares these concerns. So many people are scared to venture out of their own homes due to the fear that their favorite grocery stores do not practice social distancing and do not comply with health and safety standards. Our app, Safer Store, hopes to solve this problem and alleviate the worries of millions of precautious Americans by providing crowd-sourced information that reflects the hygiene standards of local businesses in context of the COVID-19 crisis. Our app empowers the community to make informed decisions about visiting public venues based on information provided by fellow members of the community.
What it does
Our application is 100% crowd-sourced. After visiting a store, individuals simply have to download the app, search for the store, and add their rating. They can rate the store based on seven data points:
Overall impression of safety and hygiene within the store/business? [1-5] How well does the store enforce social distancing? [1-5] Do the employees wear gloves? [Yes/No] Do the employees wear masks? [Yes/No] Does the business limit the amount of items you can buy? If so, which items? [Yes/No] Are there any common items that have been recently unavailable? If so, which items? [Yes/No] A general review regarding their experience [Text]
Now, before visiting a restaurant, grocery store, or small business, individuals can make informed decisions about venturing out of their homes based on the reviews of that given venue. After visiting the store, users can add more credibility to certain reviews by upvoting and downvoting them. Our app empowers the community to make informed decisions about visiting public venues based on information provided by fellow members of the community.
How I built it
We built our app using Google Firebase and the Google Maps API
Challenges I ran into
We initially ran into some problems regarding user data with Google Firebase. This was our first time creating a data-centric mobile application and this was definitely a learning curve for all of our team members. Additionally, our team had limited experience in mobile app development, but by relying on wonderful, free resources such as the Android Development Studio documentation, youtube, and TutorialsPoint, we were able to make a successful prototype application.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
This was our team’s first full-fledged, data-centric mobile application and we’re proud of what we could achieve this week!
What I learned
We learned the basics of Google Firebase and enhanced our skills with App Development.
What's next for the App
For our next steps, we want to add upvote and downvote features so users can see how reliable an answer truly is. In addition, we would like to explore integrating the Yelp API within our application. Future UI improvements can be made to improve data visualization.
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