SAXYS5

Inspiration

Homeless individuals can be detected during the day easily. However, it is more difficult to know their sleeping locations during the night. In addition, emergency assistance is necessary to be delivered to the homeless when there are extreme weather. The homeless might know where the exact locations of the shelters are, but it is harder for them to find an efficient and affordable way to get there. Here we propose to have "mobile shelters" to come for rescue.

What it does

From the agency point of views, they have various size of mobile shelters. The mobile shelters could be implemented as buses or vans where temporary beds (like sleeping bags) and standard supplies (like water and food) are provided. Their purpose is to pickup homeless people who are sleeping on the streets because they do not know where to get help or they are not able to (due to lack of transportation means). The homeless people might spend the night at the mobile shelters or they might be taken to the static shelter locations right away. This is extremely useful when weather is extreme and makes it unsafe to stay on the streets. Two different versions are possible. One way is to have consistent mobile shelter routes that are deployed daily or weekly. The routes will be determined optimally based on data analysis result from crowdsourcing data, survey data, and sensor data. The optimal number of buses needed will also be determined. As an additional challenge, waiting stations for the mobile shelters will also be constructuted throughout the city. The use of mobile shelther waiting stations have multiple purposes. First, they provide a temporary covered space to host the homeless while they wait for the mobile shelters. Second, information and homeless aid resources could be displayed visually at the waiting stations to raise awareness of homelessness in the community passively. The second version is where there is no consistent mobile shelter routing. Instead, when the homeless people need help, they would be able to request mobile shelter services from the waiting stations and wait to be carried to the nearest shelter. This is a mean of reducing the operational cost. It may be implemented after the first version has achieved effective results and successfully brought down the number of homeless on the streets. It is also possible to have a hybrid version of the two versions. For instance, there will be consistent mobile shelter services but also response to ad-hoc request to deliver immeidate assistance. Last but not least, the statistics collected from the various source of the data and the result statistic from the mobile shelter could be analyzed and yield valuable knowledge and insight.