SafeSummer NYC

Help beat summer with a click, with SafeSummer NYC!

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Inspiration

Every summer, extreme heat becomes a serious public health issue in New York City, with over 500 heat-related deaths reported annually. Despite the availability of resources like cooling centers, public bathrooms, and water fountains, accessing them quickly in moments of need is surprisingly difficult. We were inspired by the gap between existing infrastructure and accessibility. Current tools like Google Maps are not designed for emergency situations and often provide misleading or incomplete results. We wanted to create a solution that prioritizes human needs during extreme heat, making essential resources instantly accessible and helping people stay safe in the city.

What it does

SafeSummer NYC is an app that provides New Yorker’s with a fast, easy navigable interface for their daily emergencies as they wander around the Big Apple, such as urgent bathroom trips, charging stations, water fountains and, most importantly, cooling centers due to the immense heat that hits the city. The app provides a ‘one-click’ style that is able to take in the users location, and direct them to the nearest location of what they are looking for that attends their emergency.

How we built it

Languages/Technologies:

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS
  • VsCode

Tools:

  • ChatGPT
  • Claude

Sources:

  • NYC Open Data
  • Google Map API

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we had was creating a plan that was difficult to accomplish and underestimated the issues we soon encountered during our time hacking. A limitation that we had as a group was our small experience/exposure with certain technologies. Because of the 24hr hacking period, it was very difficult to learn both certain frameworks and languages, where we had to make the most out of the knowledge we had together as a team.

This made us change our plan of executing the project a couple more times than we wanted which unfortunately pushed us back in terms of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud to have created a semi working and a cool project that is able to solve a real problem that New Yorker’s face. We were very inspired by the issue of dangerous heat waves affecting New York, as well as the lack of services that match New York’s fast pace, and overall proud that we designed, prototype, and attempted to build our idea into an actual final product.

What we learned

We learned the importance of planning steps to a project and asking the right questions. We also learned the experience of participating in a hackathon, including the idea making, planning, coding, managing, and presenting.

We also gained meaningful information from the workshops we attended, such as the UI Design and Vibe coding, and definitely considered them when creating our product, especially the user experience of it.

What's next for SafeSummer NYC

  • Make the app seasonal and adaptive through supporting users year-round by transitioning from cooling centers in the summer to warming centers and shelters in the winter.
  • Possibly turn SafeSummer NYC into a full mobile app with more emergency services like quick access to NYC 911 or 311 when needed.
  • Introducing user feedback and community reporting, allowing users to indicate whether a location is open, close, or overcrowded.

Ultimately, we envision SafeSummer NYC evolving into a comprehensive urban support system for New York City, making essential resources more accessible, responsive and user-driven.

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