SwimScape

The idea behind SwimScape came from the University of Limerick Pontoon- a spot where we all hang out at lunchtime during college. One day we went for a dip in the water, and only afterwards did we realize that 200m upstream was a water waste treatment plant! We had no idea we were swimming in dirty water. Open water swimming is a pastime of mine as well as many other Irish people, and yet it is hard to find the hidden spots- and even harder to evaluate if they are safe for bathing.

Our mission is to gather and share accurate, real-time data on Irish open waters. We are working on developing a user friendly app which provides information about the best, safest spots for open water swimming in Ireland, particularly around the Midland areas. Our vision of making Irish open waters safer and more accessible aligns closely with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by promoting environmental responsibility, public health, and community engagement.

We built a mobile app which provides an interactive map of Ireland, marking popular swimming spots. When the user chooses a spot on the map, info such as water temperature, water quality, and overall ratings are shown.

We first made a mockup on Canva, and the we used flutterflow to build the front end. We used Firebase for the backend. We ran into challenges as we first used Supabase for our backend development, only to realise that Flutterflow, a website building application, does not support these databases. We also found it hard to use the google Maps APIs but with the help of a mentor we rose above the challenge.

We are proud of having a working demo- none of us have ever even tried to build a working app that actually looks good. In university we are used to using command line interfaces and so this was a big change. We learned that a good plan and delegation of tasks would have saved a lot of time. We jumped the gun a bit and could have done with more planning, earlier pivoting, and we also should have asked for help sooner! Our goal is to grow as a social enterprise. We need the help of our county councils to regularly test midland areas of open water swimming. There are regulations in place all around the coast (Blue Flag Beaches standard), and yet the midlands are neglected. If we could raise this issue, we could feed the data into our app to keep the public informed.