SnoutScout

Inspiration

Our grandparents always had some complications when travelling on their own so we wanted to create and help them. Particularly for older adults, this app will help people enjoy safe and happy travels.

What it does

Our app has 5 main features: Advice for your travels! This includes safety advice or general tips (eg. in NYC, it would warn you of popular tourist scams and pickpocketers) Food: You can find nearby food places with information about the type of cuisine, website to order and a short description Weapon detection: Through this option, the app will detect any knives in public settings. Landmarks: find popular nearby landmarks with a short description Translate: use this option to translate foreign texts to English. This feature is special because it is able to translate idioms!

How we built it

We used React to make the app. For advice, translation, and food/landmark description, we used Groq API with customized prompts. We also used openstreet maps for our maps. Lastly, we trained a roboflow model to detect knives.

Challenges we ran into

The most challenging part was ensuring everything was compatible with React. We tested different APIs and versions to ensure everything worked.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

When creating this app, we encountered many challenges preventing it from successfully deploying. There were countless bothersome issues that required a lot of dedicated debugging to resolve. In the end we were able to get everything working together seamlessly.

What we learned

We learned a lot about different ways to develop upon a minimum viable product project which we believe is really important because during a hackathon with minimal time, we need a minimal project that can be submitted in case we are unable to complete the full project.

What's next for SnoutScout

More diversity in weapon recognition specialized based on the user’s location Personalized food and landmark options based on user preferences More map capabilities (eg. automatically set route based on the user’s uploaded plans) Community based sharing functionalities for travellers to meet