Overview
Our product provides a convenient and safe way for Indianapolis visitors to track their interactions during high-capacity events, like conventions, concerts, and sporting events, where other attendants may come within six feet of users, therefore violating social distancing recommendations for COVID-19.
This application, which is activated during designated event times, will use Bluetooth technology to communicate with other devices in order to create an encrypted list of attendants that the user may have come in contact with. In the case of a Coronavirus diagnosis, users will have the ability to confidentially report their COVID status to our app, which will privately and securely notify the positive user’s encrypted list of attendants who may be at increased risk for contracting COVID-19 due to their close proximity at the event.
This will help ease the panic surrounding high-capacity events by ensuring that only at-risk attendants are notified, decreasing overall event liability, easing tourism apprehension, therefore returning safety to Indianapolis events.
Application: super-8-1beb0.firebaseapp.com/
Team Members
Go Team (Business & Marketing)
Haley Elgin
Haley Elgin is a rising senior at Ball State University studying Marketing and Professional Writing. Haley’s primary contributions were writing the app and website descriptions, using her business background for the Business Model Canvas and SWOT analysis, and leading the Go Team through creating personas/empathy mapping.
Aliza Presto
Aliza Presto is a rising junior at Purdue University studying Visual Communications Design. Aliza contributed by creating the Adobe XD app design, conducting research on the customers and market, and putting together the graphics that compiles the research.
Andrew K. Calvert
Andrew K. Calvert is a rising sophomore at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology majoring in Civil Engineering with a consulting engineer certificate. Andrew contributed by applying research data about consumers and the market demand to calculate the feasibility of the product for the market.
Pro Team (Software Development)
Luke Cheng
Luke Cheng is a rising senior at Purdue University studying Computer Science. Luke contributed to the project by writing the software needed for our application functionality and by implementing the UI for the front end so that customers can interact with our application.
Edward Zhao
Edward Zhao is a rising junior at Purdue University studying Data Science. Edward contributed to the project by writing the software needed for the Bluetooth detection feature of our application as well as helping out with other back-end development.
Kevin Tian
Kevin Tian is a rising sophomore at Purdue University majoring in both Data Science and Applied Statistics. Kevin contributed to the project by researching Bluetooth technology, assisted back-end end development, and served as Project Manager.
Defining the Problem Space and Our Solution
The Problem
A record-setting 30 million people from around the globe visited Indy in 2019, generating a record-setting $5.6 billion in economic impact, while supporting a record-setting 83,000 tourism jobs. More than 200 conventions have canceled to date, with the horizon fuzzy on how meetings and events look/are held heading into the future. The Indiana Convention Center has been closed since March 17 and hotels are closed. Restaurants, museums, and bars are on the verge of closing permanently. (VisitIndy)
Environmental Analysis
Our market is amidst ever-changing circumstances, with people working from home indefinitely and a general concern for large-scale gatherings. Overall, consumers want to have a sense of safety and security. There is a drop in typical capital markets, such as hotels, airplanes, tourism, and hospitality, with a rise in other capital markets like information technology, e-commerce, health, streaming, and much more. Although many apps have been created in response to COVID-19, Super8Tracking is unique in the market, made specifically for Indianapolis and flexible to improvement.(Holland)
Decision Process
We decided to make our solution as user-friendly and relevant as possible, which focused on using an everyday device, our phones. Knowing that our team has backgrounds in Software development, Business, Engineering, Data Science, and Graphic Design, we chose a solution that we could be able to produce to the best of our ability in the time-frame given.
Key Learnings
We learned that there is a huge demand for contact tracing and many companies are developing similar products. Our main focus is seeing how we can make our product unique and helpful. By using the data from the Personas, Environmental Analysis, the Value Proposition Canvas, and the Business Model Canvas, our team was able to think in the minds of our users.
Building/Iteration of the Solution
Prototyping and User Testing
To test our product, we reached out to our friends and family to test basic functionality of our app such as whether the login and signup functions work. Later on in the project after more of our project was implemented, we reached out to our coach Sushil Kumar for feedback and testing.
Project Management
For Project Management, our team used Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams to conduct and schedule our meetings with our coaches and each other. We used Google's webapps like Google Docs and Google Drive to organize files and keep track of meeting notes.
Development Process
Our team set a goal to meet at least twice-weekly to keep each other updated on our progress and ask questions when needed. Each sub-group in our team also branched out into their separate meetings to discuss topics more relevant to their subject matter, such as the Pro team meeting frequently with each other to get help and clarification on JavaScript.
Technical Architecture
The first diagram illustrates at a high-level the functionality of the app before the user logs in and the second diagram illustrates the functionality of the app after the user has logged in.
Following the diagrams, links to the GitHub Repositories for the front-end named "frontend" and the back-end named "functions" are listed.
Note: Some of the functionality described in the “Post-Login Functionality” diagram was not able to be implemented due to web browser security issues.
Click to View Image Below in Full-size:
Click to View Image Below in Full-size:
Click me to visit Frontend GitHub Repo
Click me to visit Back-end GitHub Repo
Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks
The Go Team
Utilized Adobe XD and Adobe Illustrator for the User Interface, branding, the logo and the research diagrams.
The Pro Team
Utilized the publicly available Web-Bluetooth API to implement the Bluetooth functionality of the application (Click Me to View API documentation).
The Pro team also utilized Express.js, React, Material-UI, and JavaScript to build the user interface and used Google’s Firebase for the back-end to store user data. Express.js, React, and Material-UI were chosen because of familiarity in addition to the flexibility to create a custom UI to fit our product. Google’s Firebase was chosen for convenience and also familiarity.
Further Steps and Application Scalability
Expanding Our Target Audience
We would expand the target audience to see how to best serve other tourist destinations, like restaurants and different businesses like retail. We would want to find ways to be more integrated with other existing apps that help with tourism, such as Yelp and TripAdvisor. Integration would peak our personas’ interest in marketing the app as useful, not an inconvenience. Keeping that in mind, we would need to do more research on different personas by conducting interviews and collecting information about interest in our app. Getting directly involved and talking to businesses in Indianapolis will allow us to see what they need as a tourist industry, not solely what we assume they need.
App Scalability
Moreover, we would take the current idea which is currently a working website and transition it over to a mobile app in which the app can be conveniently used by people and the event hosts. When scaling the website into an app on iOS/Android, we would use the app design mock-up featured in our presentation and work out the technicalities of the workflow to make it seamless, user-friendly and effective. By implementing our product as an iOS/Android app, we would be able to implement more Bluetooth functionality and security features that current modern browsers don't support.
Apple and Google are already working on something quite similar to our product; however, our product not only helps track whether or not you may have come in contact with a COVID-19 carrier, but also is specific to the Indianapolis area. It has potential to expand to other cities, but the focus for our app prioritizes Indianapolis to tackle the tourism issue there first instead of being so wide scope like Apple and Google.
Mockup Click Me to View the Mockup
Acknowledgements
Super 8 would like to express our gratitude to TechPoint and their staff for hosting the S.O.S Challenge and for giving our team the opportunity to network together, learn about the technology scene in Indianapolis, and create a solution that we can be proud of.
Next, we would like to thank Chris Gahl and Elise Shrock, our Tourism Subject Matter Experts, for volunteering their time and knowledge which was extremely valuable to the creation of our overall final product. Lastly, Super 8 is sincerely grateful for the help of Nicki Rough and Sushil Kumar, our coaches from NextGear Capital, who were critical to our team’s success during this program. Nicki and Sushil provided encouragement, real-world perspectives and schedule reminders which helped us improve the quality of our product and keep our team on track throughout the program.
Sources
VisitIndy About Visit Indy. Visit Indy, www.visitindy.com/indianapolis-about-visit-indy.
Holland, Kimberly. "What COVID-19 Is Doing to Our Mental Health." Healthline Media, 8 May 2020, www.healthline.com/health-news/what-covid-19-is-doing-to-our-mental-health.
ICCLOS Response to COVID-19. ICCLOS, 1 July 2020, www.icclos.com/icclos-response-to-covid-19/
Indy Welcomes You Back Safely. Visit Indy, www.visitindy.com/indianapolis-indy-welcomes-you-back-safely
Web-Bluetooth API (Click Me to View API documentation).
Mockup Click Me to View the Mockup
Built With
- express.js
- firebase
- javascript
- material-ui
- react
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