Care Centric

Community Based Disaster Relief for Emergency Preparedness, now available at the speed of sound.

Comment

Inspiration

Our team is very passionate about social contributions to the world. Being a group of techies, we tend to think of ideas that will save lives by using the latest technology patterns that make it convenient for people to contribute as well as ask help from society. We wanted to do something for the elderly and disabled population. Older adults and the disabled that live in the community face some challenges during an emergency situation like evacuation during natural disasters. It's hard to identify, locate, and reach at-risk populations in an emergency like that. The government's 911 service is overwhelmed with calls during these situations. We want to help the government as well as the target population with an easy and convenient way to avert this scenario.

What it does

  • Our Alexa skill helps the users in need of an emergency to simply describe the event, and we connect them to volunteers in real time. The volunteers have a simple to use android/iOS application that will alert them during any such emergency requests. On accepting to help, the victim would be getting all the details of the volunteer that will be reaching out to them.
  • We have made this application and Alexa skill keeping the elderly in mind. Therefore, we enable our application completely by voice, so there are no complex applications that someone needs to figure out during an emergency.

How I built it

  • We built the Alexa skill on a serverless AWS Lambda platform enabling millions of requests to come in without worrying about the scalability.
  • Android Application was built with Android Studio IDE coded in Java.
  • Back End is completely serverless ie. running on AWS lambda.
  • Queuing is done with Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) that makes sure that every request is handled with a priority, and more importantly, makes sure that every request will be served.

Challenges I ran into

  • AWS SDK for Android was more difficult to configure than any other integration.
  • Queuing in the right manner.
  • Making a smooth dialog on Alexa that integrates flawlessly with our android application.
  • Alexa Skills Kit doesn't allow any "Description" kind of intents where a user can speak anything. Every utterance is impossible to add considering the dynamic nature of an emergency.
  • Research on the topic.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Consider this, Mary (an elderly) living alone in a community house far away from her son, needs help in an emergency situation like evacuation during a forest fire. With only her voice she asks for help and gets connected to a volunteer which happens to be her neighbor. Her neighbor is evacuating too and has extra space in their car to accommodate another person. We have now helped someone to come out of danger without waiting for help to arrive. That's what we're proud of!

What I learned

  • A lot about the problems that the elderly population face during these situations with very effective statistics.
  • How to successfully build and publish an Alexa skill.
  • AWS helped us reduce development times by a huge factor.
  • Alexa Skills Kit can still do with some enhancements.
  • Android Studio crashes a lot. :P

What's next for Care Centric

We plan to partner with organizations like Neighbors helping Neighbors, and more to help integrate this into their network of volunteers.

Share this project:

Updates