Inspiration
What if we could get notified in real time every time an emergency happened near us? Maybe someone just fell through the ice in the lake outside your house and the emergency services are still 10 minutes away, maybe someone is having a heart attack in your office building and you know CPR! The idea behind this project is to use real time data provided by the police, hospitals and other emergency services so that people can be informed of events happening in relevant locations. The application can go one step further to allow the police to input the events into the database as they happen and give the user a suggested action. There is a gun man in your building, please exit as fast as possible. There is a fire happening a block from you, please film it from a safe distance to to gather evidence on the current status for the fireman. This application can seamlessly connect the emergency services and the public and help to save lives.
What it does
We built a real-time web application with its functionality being displaying crimes, accidents and events on a visual map over Sweden. When clicking on a event the user gets a description, type of event, suggested action and URL for external post about the event. We also built a admin dashboard where the policemen can add events when something new occurs, that is not already in their API, which will be directly visible to the users.
How we built it
We built the application using on of many JavaScript framework for the front-end called ReactJS. React only updates what is completely necessary to update, instead of a hard realod on the entire website. For the back-end server we used a GoLang server on the back-end to send the requested data to a python file that formats the JSON to the proper format for then sending it back to server, and continuing with sending it back to the client.
Challenges we ran into
Since we used so many different languages, frameworks and tools we did ran into quite some difficulties. One of the bigger videos we worked on was getting everything on the back-end to be publicly available for the client to use and display using Google Maps. Another issue was the team having issues with JSON Encoding. The JSON file with all the events contained some weird characters between the objects caused by different encodings between the development machines. We solved it by constantly removing the character.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are satisfied we completed the project, even though our 2 other members did not show up on Saturday morning. Also, we are very satisfied we managed to completed it although we used so many different tools and framworks.
What's next for SBH
- Turn it into a mobile application
- Get events in real time using date tag
- Send notifications to the user in real time
- Allow for the integration with other emergency services
- Get the route that the emergency services will take and notify users in that path so that the way cann be cleared
- Let the user choose its preferences
- Add a home and work location as well as current location
- Let the user see what type of emergency it wants to get notified
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