Telus-Telyou

Our solution sends emergency alerts on Twitter in case of natural disasters using Telus's unprecedented network.

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Inspiration

We wanted to make an impact on the community through this Makeathon. Many disasters can lead to large and avoidable losses of lives and resources because of the delay in notifying the rescue teams. Some disasters even go unnoticed because of personal and political reasons. Thus, we decided to come up with a solution using Telus's LTE Developer Shield.

What it does

We harnessed the power of Telus LTE Network to post emergency alerts on twitter in order to alert the owner as well as nearby police and fire station in cases of fire, flood, and other natural disasters. The tweet would contain all the necessary environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, and GPS location making it easier for rescue teams to act accordingly.

How we built it

We used a Raspberry Pi as the main controller and Telus IoT Dev Shield to seamlessly connect to the LTE network. We used python, tweepy, Solace to post an alert on Twitter using Twitter's API.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges and we learned a lot while solving each one of them. Our Raspberry Pi was not working as the SD card was broken. This caused further errors when trying to re-install Raspbian. Furthermore, our Telus Dev Shield was not connecting to the network due to an inconsistent signal. However, in the end, we were able to solve each one of them through thorough troubleshooting and we successfully completed the project.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We were able to implement all the features that we wanted to and we are proud to be able to finish the project in 24 hours.

What we learnt

We learned how to install Raspbian and multiple dependencies on the Raspberry Pi and configure it by familiarizing ourselves with the terminal. We learned some technical aspects of the Telus Dev Shield and realized its potential to make a huge impact in the community. We also gained some important python skills. Using Twitter Developer Account, Azure IoT hub, tweepy were also great experiences.

What's next for Telus-Telyou

Taking a step forward with the project, we would like to make it more efficient by adding more functions that it can perform. We could incorporate flood monitoring system and earthquake detection that would help our project to report more natural calamities and help try reduce their losses. We could also make the app to have access to various other social media platforms helping more people to easily access its information. Furthermore, we could incorporate ML/AI in order to create an accurate threshold for determining whether or not a natural disaster is occurring rather than a false positive.

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