WildFire Protect

Wildfire Parametric Insurance product providing people relief from severity of climate change effects by offering immediate insurance claim avoiding hassles and delay of legacy systems

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Inspiration

Firstly as a team, we were inspired to spend this weekend on making something for the betterment of society, each one of the team members feels tech can do a lot more in helping people solve problems at scale and impacting a large number of people. Climate Change is one such problem and we are inspired to build products mitigating its effects through new technologies.

What it does

Wildfire Protect is a wildfire parametric insurance product which provides instant payouts to the insured in case of wildfire damaging their property, the other significant feature of Wildfire Protect is to help potential householders take an informed decision in purchasing the house by looking at areas that are vulnerable to wildfires.

How we built it

We build the backend insurance product using Ethereum based blockchain taking use of a library called Etherisc which uses NodeJS and Solidity, 'The Oracle' - part of the product looking at trigger criteria was built using real-time imagery from MODIS, Landsat and Sentinel satellites. The database used for storing customer information was MySQL and the front end is created using React and Express.js

Challenges we ran into

Lack of real-time satellite data in multiple spectral bands and the granularity which was desired. Images with thick cloud cover were rendered useless as the geographic damage could not be assessed. Also challenges of making a blockchain app especially connecting backend to the client-side.

Dealing with the challenges in satellite data involved pre-processing the obtained data to combine the 3 RGB+NIR bands and localizing to the building in question.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First and foremost we are proud of making a hack around social good and with the intention of helping people face challenges of climate change. Technology-wise, it was the first time we worked with Blockchain and Satellite data.

What we learned

How to work with blockchain technology, satellite data and domain knowledge of the insurance product.

What's next for

Trying to make this app into a full fledged product! We will be sharing updates soon.

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