Inspiration
There are many instances of crime in any city, and although they may be rare, they occur and people deserve to know when they enter a neighborhood where they aren't so rare. Tourists and natives alike encounter urban areas with which they are not familiar, and we wanted to build something that would help people avoid dangerous neighborhoods. This way, users can make a much more informed decision as to where they spend their time, or how they get home. They don't have to feel in danger simply because they don't know the city as well as someone else. We hope that our product will prevent crimes before they even happen.
What it does
The Pebble uses the geolocation from the user's phone to identify if the user is near a dangerous neighborhood. It reports the crime data for a given neighborhood only if the data eclipses a certain threshold (i.e. only if the neighborhood is especially dangerous). Specifically, it alerts the user of the three most dangerous types of crimes committed in the last five years, and their frequency. The Pebble will update someone's location every ten seconds, so that no matter when and where they are, they could be warned about potential danger.
How we built it
We collected data on the GPS locations of every crime committed in New York City in the past five years. We then divided the city into 129,000 small blocks that are approximately 0.002 miles squared each. We then built a database around each of these small districts, and used the Pebble geolocation API to determine which block the user would be in. From there, the watch could identify the three major crimes committed in that district, and deliver the information back to the user.
Challenges we ran into
Data collection was an especially difficult part of this project. We had to find a comprehensive data set that would give us enough accurate information so as to inform the user instead of muddle the safe and less safe neighborhoods in New York. Coding in CloudPebble could also be difficult as it was a completely new product for our team. We also faced some technical issues in developing a web server. However, we overcame these issues eventually, and we were able to transmit the data we had worked so hard to analyze.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are especially proud of our ability to adapt to the Pebble, and our ability to travel with our user, and provide warnings in real time as they move through New York. We are also impressed with our data collection, which was a robust collection of every crime committed from the NY Police Department. Moreover, we were careful to only include information that would help the user. This meant trimming the data set, and not including the information that preceded 2011.
What we learned
Aside from some boilerplate Javascript and C, we learned a lot about how crimes are reported and how high the variance can be between neighborhoods. We had to make important decisions about how to give this information to the user in a helpful way that would not alarm them without good reason.
What's next for WatchOut
There are several ways to expand from this, and one of the additional functionalities we are currently working to implement is an emergency message. It would work from one of the buttons on the Pebble and would send a ready-made SMS to an emergency contact. This would give users an incredibly fast and easy way to alert their loved ones when they're in trouble.
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