This our contribution to the Call for Code hackathon at SJSU.
After listening to the lightning talks we identified that there is a need for better communication between survivors, relatives, and first responders. We wanted to focus on usability in low connection situations and forgo a registration progress.
It allows survivors to ask for help through a quick and efficient process. While leveraging the device's GPS. It allows first responders to know where survivors are making it easier to get them into safety. Furthermore relatives are able to leverage the chat bot to obtain information about whether their family members have been found through their use of the web application. They can ask the chat bot if if their family member has been found, what the condition is in the area, and how many shelters are in the area.
We used MERN through the IBM cloud and the Watson AI chat box. The front end was developed using react and each component was split up between each person. Those components are later pushed through git and merged together into one file.
Some challenges that we ran into was setting up the cloud. The installation failed several of times for everyone due to complications and it took about an hour to get it working. Also react was a new language for many of us, so we were learning the syntax of it while we created our web page.
An accomplishment we are proud of is the teamwork. We are able to plan out our web app, giving ideas and thoughts on those idea, then executing it. The tasks were divide accordingly, which made creating the web app more efficient.
We learned that not everything is going to go as plan. As we were planning what we were originally going to do, we realized that there were many variables, such as low connectivity, leading us to removing aspects from our original plan.