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Social Distancing Alert Recognizing People and Warning to Maintain Distance
Inspiration
During the Covid-19 situation, getting outside is a rarity. With the continuation of rising Covid-19 cases, the importance of social distancing, when we do go outside, is rising as well. In enclosed spaces and rooms, including doctor's offices, school classrooms, malls, and more, there is limited ventilation and limited space making it more difficult to maintain social distancing and one may not even notice when someone is less than six feet away from them. The problem worsens as winter approaches. As we enter flu season, our immunity levels are lower from spending most of our time at home for the past few months, putting people in a higher risk for getting Covid-19 from others. The only way to reduce this risk is to social distance and this problem inspired me to build Social Distancing Alert to help people stay safe and maintain social distancing.
What it does
Social Distancing Alert is an application that can be run on one's phone as soon as they enter a room. The application will connect to a camera in the room and monitor the room. As it monitors the room, the application provides 2 alerts. Based on the size of the room, the application will calculate the largest amount of people that can be in the room and maintain social distancing. After this calculation, the application will count the number of people in a room and send an alert when the number of people in the room cross the threshold. Another task the application completes as it watches the room is to monitor the room for social distancing. The application calculates the distances between people in the room, as soon as a person moves closer than 6 feet to another person, the application sends an alert that warns to maintain social distancing.
How I built it
I built Social Distancing Alert with Python using OpenCV.
Challenges I ran into
I ran into trouble with merging the back-end, the OpenCV aspect, and the front-end, the website. However, I was able to research and find out how to implement both through using Flask.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I am proud that I was able to create a project that helps towards the efforts of staying safe and isolated during the Covid-19 situation. Although I couldn't create a website, I was also proud that I was able to learn and implement skills that included merging a website, for front-end, and python code, for back-end, to produce this project.
What I learned
As mentioned above, I learned more about the capabilities of OpenCV as well as how to implement it with front-end.
What's next for Social Distancing Alert
I would like to further improve Social Distancing Alert by optimizing the program to detect social distancing between people in larger and more open spaces. I would also like to improve the project so that when the camera does detect people that aren't social distancing, it sends a signal only to the two people who aren't social distancing and not to everyone that has the app open. Furthermore, I would like to implement this project as an app as well as a website to allow for more convenience for users.
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