"Someone Here"

Coordinating people and resources during a catastrophic disaster with lack of network connectivity

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Inspiration

We interviewed volunteers that went to help during hurricane Harvey, and found that there wasn't a platform for people to communicate and coordinate with one another. A lot of volunteers were ready to help but couldn't because they didn't know what to do and where to go. Call centers and emergency numbers were not working efficiently because of the high volume of calls. This lack of communication leads to chaos and ineffective volunteer efforts.

We intended to solve this problem by providing a new communication system that will coordinate between people who need help and people that can provide help, even when there is no network available.

What it does

SomeoneHere connects to all the people around you, and asks you if you need assistance or can provide help to others. After a few refining questions you can directly chat with the person you will meet (to help or be helped) and arrange the details.

How we built it

We based our app on a socket.io communication system, that will fail-over a UDark (Bluetooth/WiFi mesh) communication when phone signal is not available. All phones will try to join the mesh and relay information to others, so that all the requests and offers are available to everyone. We used ESRI arcGis map API to display those information as well as relevant data on a map.

Challenges we ran into

  • How to make the flow simple.
  • Multi-layer communication is hard!
  • Understanding ARCGis API, and using the offline capabilities (fail).
  • Learning Android on the spot
  • Staying awake, fed and hydrated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works! Our phones are chatting with each other through 3G, wifi, and bluetooth. The flow is simple and easy to understand.

What we learned

  • Android coding
  • Libraries like ESRI, UDark, Socket.IO
  • Working with friends is priceless!

What's next for Someone Here

  • Getting the offline maps to work.
  • Refining the flow for new emergency requests.
  • Saving lives.
  • Refine the map for users to update road conditions
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