AidTech

Despite the many recent disasters, organizations are inefficiently managing their relief and recovery operations

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Video Demo Includes Presentation and demo of website

Inspiration

The recent slew of natural disasters, such as California wildfires, Hawaii's volcanic eruptions, and Puerto Rico's hurricanes have made it clear that improvements in disaster relief and recovery are vital.

In terms of immediate relief: Due to extreme weather conditions, emergency services are often times not able to conduct search rescues and miss out on the small window of finding survivors.

Supplies sent to Puerto Rico in 2017 in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria were found abandoned and rotting in trucks one year later. Supplies sent to aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey were burned and thrown in sea because they piled up to the point of becoming toxic.

In terms of recovery: There is a lot of controversy and debate about where donors' contributions are actually going. Some organizations are not transparent about how they spend money, not sure how and to which efforts to distribute their funds, and not allocating their budget to the right places for the right reason. Despite all the money available, relief and recovery are still not efficient and effective enough.

What it does

In order to remediate and improve the disaster relief and recovery process, we decided to design and build AidTech, a 3-tiered web application meant for internal users of disaster relief and recovery organizations, such as Red Cross.

  1. Upon opening the website, users arrive to the Disaster Location tab where they are able to select the disaster they want to focus on. Each disaster contains the location, the type of disaster (hurricane, wildfires, flooding, etc.), as well as the priority (immediate, moderate or low).

  2. Users can then navigate to either the Emergency Search tab, Supplies Tracking tab, or Funds Allocation tab. The Emergency Search feature is meant for the organization to locate potentially harmed, trapped, or missing survivors. Google's Video Intelligence service will analyze live stream videos from deployed drones, helicopters, and other vehicles. Once a person is detected, users on the site can see the location, description of the person, and the rescue status. If a person has not yet been rescued, users can dispatch the closest emergency personnel or workers on premise, which can be tracked using Verizon's Mobile Workers Management service.

  3. The Supplies Tracking tab allows the organization to see where all its supplies are. Using Verizon's Asset Tracking service, the organization will be updated on the location, temperature, destination, weight, and other details about the supplies. Once the supplies reach the local area, users will also be able to see if the supplies have been distributed.

  4. The Funds Allocation tab allows the organization to see a predicted model of how to split its budget for that certain disaster. Business intelligence (such as Tableau or Microsoft Power BI) is used to analyze previous budget allocations to similar disasters as well as post disaster damage surveys and observations. The organization can see the budget, a pie chart of where the funds should be allocated (which will be updated as funds are actually being used), a visual table of the budget allocations, as well as money leftover from the budget.

How we built it

The web application was built using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The API's we used are Google Maps and Video Intelligence.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was fleshing out the concept and project. Every team member had many great ideas, but we had to come to a consensus on what we would all be happy working with. We had to take out features, add features, and decide which features we wanted to learn and work with. At one point we were so frustrated that we wanted to leave, but we decided to stick through it to the end.

When developing the web application, we initially used the Angular framework; however, we encountered many technical difficulties with typescript and therefore decided to build our website just with HTML, CSS, and JS. There were also many formatting issues that had to be resolved.

Since we were using Google Cloud for the first time, we had trouble getting started with how to use the Google Video Intelligence, including downloading modules.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Able to work as a team to develop a solution we all contributed to and were happy and excited to build
  • Attending workshops and networking with sponsors
  • Honed html, css, and javascript skills, as well as learned about new formatting techniques
  • Integrating the google maps API
  • Figuring out how to get started and successfully use the video intelligence API

What we learned

  • Working in a team is not always easy, especially when everyone has brilliant, but different ideas.
  • How to listen to and understand each others ideas
  • How to use git to collaborate on a project as a group
  • New formatting techniques with HTML and CSS
  • The video intelligence API is not easy to use

What's next for AidTech

  • Actually develop a business intelligence model instead of using a business intelligence platform such as Tableau or Microsoft Power BI
  • Potential partnerships with companies like Verizon
  • More features, such as a before/after comparison of landscape images to analyze the impact of natural events, that can assist organizations with disaster recovery
  • For emergency searching with Google's video intelligence, people who are missing their loved ones can upload pictures and descriptions of people and the video analyzer with try to match survivors found through live streams to uploaded pictures and descriptions of people

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