CURA

CURA: Care for people in distress when they need it the most

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GlobalHack VI - Team Cura

i. Application: Cura

ii. Division: Professional

iii. App Name: Cura

iv. App tagline: Cura: Care for people in distress when they need it the most

v. App description:

Cura is an intelligent platform for emergency case management, shelter management and pre-prevention identification. The intelligent emergency case management system allows people to send a distress SMS to a certain phone number and the system will use Natural Language Processing and Sentiment analysis to figure out the level of distress, location of the person, and main urgency word and process a request. This request will add his case and location to the system as well as send an emergency SMS to the on-call person. Aside from emergency management, the platform also provides facilities for bed management in available non-emergency shelters. This functionality enables people to text their shelter needs in a brief SMS message, parsing the message to identify the persons gender, status and number of people with them. Then the system based on bed availability tied to shelter requirements will text the person the shelters with open beds, avoiding unneeded visits to the wrong shelters. Lastly, we provide a pre-prevention interface for people that feel are at risk of homelessness to provide some details highly linked to potential homelessness factors. This centralized repository will allow volunteers and aid workers to keep track of potential future people at risk and act before their situation becomes dire.

What it does / How it works:

Cura is an intelligent platform for emergency case, shelter management and pre-prevention identification:

Emergency Shelter Case Management:

In case of extreme emergencies (weather or other) we provide facilities for people to send a regular SMS with a sentence to an emergency response number (406-530-1801). Our system will use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Sentiment Analysis to parse the text message and identify three things:

  1. The Urgency of the situation and provide a score, based on the analysis of the message
  2. The location provided by the person (street, or street and number) - we have added all streets in St. Louis for instant recognition
  3. The most relevant 'emergency' keyword

A sample emergency SMS can be: Freezing to death, very cold, need help 151 Chippewa St.

The emergency shelter system will send a response SMS, provide an alert on the case management system and SMS one of the persons on call for addressing the situation. Our system will keep track of all cases and will recognize existing phone numbers

Regular Shelter Bed Case Management:

Instead of having people show up to a shelter that is full or closed, we provide facilities for people to send a regular SMS message with a brief description of their case to (559-STL-BEDS or 559-785-2337). Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) our system determines keywords in the text message to route people to the proper place based on the services they provide. The things we extract are:

  1. Gender
  2. Status (veteran, sex offender)
  3. Age group
  4. Number of people with the person

A sample Shelter bed request SMS can be: I am Female, Veteran and youth with 3 people

Pre-prevention:

Due to the very incomplete and sparse data with only true positive cases provided, we determined that a machine learning model for homelessness prediction is not feasible and an appropriate route to pursue. However we provide the next best thing: a questionnaire to track people that might need help in the future. Our questionnaire asks typical HUD questions as well as certain factors determined by Cohen in "Aging and Homelessness." The Gerontologist 39 (1999): 5–14. This voluntarily filled in questionnaire will allow the organizations to keep track of who will need help in the future or is in the verge of losing their home.

How we built it / Tech Stack:

Best viewed in Google Chrome

Webapp developed using:

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Web styling:

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Natural Language Processing in PHP via - PHP Nlp Tools

https://github.com/angeloskath/php-nlp-tools/

Sentiment Analysis in PHP Via - phpInsight

https://github.com/JWHennessey/phpInsight

Challenges we ran into

Being a very ambitious hackathon, the problem is quite a monumental task. With multiple and very diverse requirements not completely specified on paper, we managed to find two areas we think we could make the most impact. After attending the homelessness panel, discussing with some of the experts and constantly harassing the slack channel, we managed to narrow down to three problems. We would have loved to use the provided data, but being highly incomplete, very sparse and with only positive cases, any types of machine learning and modeling would be a disservice to the organizations. However, we managed to still use NLP and sentiment analysis techniques to provide highly functional systems to achieve multiple automated tasks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Tackling three of the biggest problems (prevention, emergency shelter services, and shelter assignments) we provided automated solutions for emergency shelter services and shelter assignment. We also provide a unique perspective for pre-prevention of people at risk by having a place to collect this information in a centralized environment.

What we learned

We learned more than we hopped about how the organizations fighting homelessness operate and all the technical shortcomings they need to overcome. We also learned that even in a few days, non-obvious solutions can be produced to help.

What's next for Cura

Put the data captured into the system to use. There are many analytics and machine learning techniques that can be applied to a clean and concise dataset, which could provide useful insights and predictive or at least classification models.

License

All code here is released with a Simplified BSD License, any additional libraries and code has its respective licenses indicated and do not supersede the freedoms of the Simplified BSD License:

Copyright (c) 2016, Team Cura All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

  1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
  2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

The views and conclusions contained in the software and documentation are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of the FreeBSD Project.

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