Social Distancing Helper

Stay distanced! Keep the city safe!

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Inspiration

Our brainstorming sessions revolved around the Social Impact Track. The team is based out in Montreal, one of Canada's COVID-19 hot spots. In recent weeks, we have had a rise in variant cases which is worrisome since our province already has difficulty managing the original virus. Thus, we deemed it important to find a way to help our local community. We decided to provide them with a mobile app that allows civilians to make informed live decisions with regards to social distancing. We are going to use React Native since it's cross platform.

What it does

The application has various features:

  • Users get an SMS warning (if they signed up with their phone number) that they're entering a COVID-19 Red or Orange Zone.
  • There's a Crowd Heat Map that pinpoints all people using the application live. People can in turn decide what's the best path to take to avoid contact with others.
  • There's a NewsFeed tab that allows users to see the latest #covid tweets.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the competition, we faced different challenges. First of all, it was challenging to work with a completely new framework, React Native with Expo, since none of us had any prior experience with it. However, we really enjoyed learning how to use it. Furthermore, it was challenging to find and learn three different external APIs (Twilio (SMS), Twitter API, COVID-19 Data API) to complete the purpose of our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We all challenged ourselves by learning on new technologies.
  • We were able to utilize 3 different APIs.
  • We were able to complete a full prototype which demonstrates the purpose of our project.
  • We had an amazing collaboration and team work dynamic.
  • We didn't give up despite how tired we were :3 (we even got to sleep a bit (most of us))

What we learned

  • Each team member made it a priority to try something new:
    • Lara (pro hacker): Good Angular Front-End Web Development and C# Back-End. Learned React Native with Expo and Twitter API.
    • Hampic(pro hacker): Good Background in Web Development and Basic Android mobile Apps. Learned React Native with Expo, Twilio API and Google Maps API.
    • Viveka(pro hacker): Good Background in Web Development and Basic Android mobile Apps. Learned React Native with Expo, Twilio API, Twitter API and JSON.
    • Greta (new hacker): Good Background in Data Science with R. Learned React Native with Expo, Twilio API and Google Maps API.

What's next for Social Distancing Helper

Down the road, we can improve this app by getting more users. Furthermore, we can notify the people when they approach crowded places and not only when they are in red or orange zones. Having the covid-19 zones at the level of the cities and around the world.

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