handipark

Inspiration

We wanted to provide the handicapped minority with a way to find the most convenient handicapped parking location in terms of the easiest walking commute to their destination.

What it does

HandiPark intelligently finds lots with handicapped parking spaces near a user-determined destination to minimize commute time from the lot to the destination — an important consideration for people who find walking difficult. Upon inputting a destination, the app provides the user with the most optimal route to the destination as well as the most convenient nearby parking lots filtered by minimal walking commute time.

How we built it

We used Python to interface with the Inrix APIs to get information about routing, parking lots, and space availability. The data is sent to the iOS app, which uses HealthKit and MapKit to determine the commute time from the parked car to the final destination.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges with Flask and interacting with the API. Our front-end went pretty smoothly, but we also had to cut down on features in order to spend more time working with our custom Flask API and parsing its response.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Perhaps our proudest accomplishment is finding a way to effectively work as a team. Despite our team being composed of six people, each with wildly different skill levels and areas of expertise, each member was able to make a meaningful contribution to the final project while learning from the others.

What we learned

Every single one of us grew a great deal; the backend developers learned so much about working with APIs and Swift, while the frontend developers learned more about Apple APIs (specifically HealthKit and MapKit) and Python development. Everyone learned a lot about Git, but perhaps most importantly, we learned how to work effectively as a team.

What's next for HandiPark

There is so much room for HandiPark to grow. Perhaps the first step is to implement our color palette, which has been carefully selected to be both beautiful and high-contrast to assist the visually impaired (one target market for the app). Next, we can use the Inrix Block API to provide data for street parking in order to serve more possible spots for the user. The best part is that the basic power of the app—that is, the combination of Inrix's APIs with Apple's walking data—allows the app to be repurposed for other uses; for example, one can use it to find the ideal place to park in high traffic areas to arrive at the destination faster (in cases where walking is faster than driving).

Built With

• findroutes
• healthkit
• lots
• mapkit
• python
• swift