SnapAlert

SnapAlert is designed to address everyday hazards and health risks that often go unreported in dense environments like campuses and urban centers. So the users can avoid health risks, hazards, etc.

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Our Project Story: Building a Community-Powered Safety System

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from something simple: everyday hazards that people walk past but rarely report. Broken branches. Smoke hotspots. Slippery floors. Blocked pathways. Suspicious activity.

We realized that these problems are not ignored because people don't care—they're ignored because reporting systems are slow, outdated, or hidden behind too many steps.

College campuses especially stood out. They behave like super-spreader hubs due to shared living, high-density interactions, and crowded facilities. A modeling study showed that COVID-19 cases in over half of U.S. campuses surged above (1000) cases per (100,000) people per week within just two weeks of reopening. Combined with the 26.2 million annual U.S. emergency visits caused by unintentional injuries, we saw a clear problem:

Communities lack a fast, real-time, anonymous way to surface hazards before they harm someone.

That became our mission.

What We Learned

Throughout this project, our team learned:

  • How environmental hazards and health issues spread on campuses and in cities
  • How crowdsourcing improves early detection and response
  • The basics of GIS heatmapping and geo-spatial clustering
  • How gamification drives user action through incentives like Hero Points, levels, and verification bonuses
  • How to transform community behavior using user-centered design
  • How to protect privacy by storing only location context—not personal identifiers

We also learned to think like both city operators and users, bridging the gap between safety systems and human behavior.

How We Built It

We split responsibilities across three core components:

1. Real-Time Reporting System

  • Tap-to-report interface
  • Anonymous submission
  • Auto-tagging categories (hazards, smoke, blocked paths, spills, suspicious activity, etc.)
  • Image upload for verification

2. Geo-Heatmap Engine

  • Receives all incoming reports
  • Applies clustering algorithms such as DBSCAN to group nearby hazards
  • Updates a real-time heatmap visible to all users
  • Ensures privacy by displaying only generalized location zones (never exact user coordinates)

3. Gamification Layer

  • Designed Hero Points system:
  • Rewarded users for:
    • Reporting
    • Being the first observer
    • Verifying someone else’s report
    • Helping during critical hazards (e.g., accidents, spills)
  • Added levels, badges, and a personal dashboard

  • Ensured the system motivates—not manipulates—community participation

  • Talking AI assistant:

    • Included a assistant that teaches the users how to navigate the project
    • Included Elevenlabs text to speech feature in both successful submission and our AI assistant

Challenges We Faced

1. Balancing Privacy and Precision

We needed accurate hazard locations without revealing user identities or exact coordinates. Creating a privacy-safe heatmap took multiple iterations.

2. Avoiding False or Spam Reports

Crowdsourcing risks noise. We introduced:

  • Report verification by other users
  • Severity scoring
  • Trust-weighted points

3. Designing Fun, Not Distracting, Gamification

The gamification had to encourage awareness—not turn safety into a game. We spent time balancing incentives to support the mission.

4. Integrating Everyone’s Work

Heatmap, backend, and gamification had to sync smoothly. Agreeing on shared data formats—JSON fields, timestamps, anonymized location buckets—was essential.

Outcome

We built a system that allows anyone to report hazards instantly, view them in a live heatmap, and earn points for keeping their community safer.

It’s safety, health, and awareness—crowdsourced.

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