Resilience

Inspiration

Recently, there have been many natural disasters that have affected many major metropolitan areas.Two of the most recent areas affected were Houston and Puerto Rico, which were both hit by hurricanes. Our goal was to create a project that would help victims of natural disasters to be able effectively and efficiently recover. areas. Some of the most recent places that have been hit include Houston, which was hit by a hurricane and major flooding, as well as Puerto Rico, which was hit by an earthquake. These natural disasters have detrimental affects on both the entire r Our goal was to create a project that would help victims of natural disasters to be able effectively and efficiently recover after being affected by natural disasters.

What it does

System.out.println("Hello World!");

But actually, our product provides integration of both web and android interfaces. The website contains information for three categories of people: victims of the natural disaster, volunteers to assist those who were affected, and contractors to assist with rebuilding of physical property. The website hosts a Google Map that uses the user's dynamic current location to display nearby points of interest, such as local hospitals and relief centers. This map also contains information regarding necessities that victims of the disaster are desperately in need of. In conjunction with this information, there is also information displayed regarding relief organizations (Ex: Red Cross) and local volunteers who are willing to mobilize resources to help those in need. The intent of this is to increase effective measures of assisting in the recovery status-post disaster.

To complement these two sets of information, our web application will also host a matching system for contractors and those who were affected by the disaster. This system would allow for those affected to report the damages to their properties, and have contractors provide them with fast quotes and responses. Our intent with this functionality is to speed up the overall recovery process for any affected homeowners and areas.

We also decided to create a mobile android application to work in tandem with the web interface. The mobile application has another map separate from the web application that takes in the user's dynamic current location and shows them hospitals nearby and their current status/wait times, locations of nearby relief organizations, locations and needs of affected individuals nearby, and the locations of nearby volunteers, as well as what services they can provide. This application can also show affected roads (ex: fallen trees, broken traffic lights, road closures) to allow for users to understand current travel risks. This application can also advise users on travel routes to take from point A to point B.

How we built it

Integration of Google Maps API with Android Studio to create the mobile application. PolyLine was used in order to create travel routes between different locations. Rust, HTML, Bootstrap, and Heroku were used to create the web interface.

Challenges we ran into

Issues with Google Maps API and Heroku.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning PolyLine integration and Google Place API usage. Also, we learned more about Heroku.

What we learned

We learned how Heroku worked, as well as how to better integrate Google APIs.

What's next for Resilience

We hope to continue working on this project till completion to ensure that we have achieved full functionality and ease of use for all users. Hopefully, we can see an app like this become feasibly integrated into current disaster relief systems to increase overall efficiency.