Chill Path

Hot summer day, don't feel like walking? Want an easier route? Use Chill Path to find the best walking route for you!

Comment

Inspiration

Toronto experienced one of its craziest heat waves in its history. This is also a global issue as 489,000 individuals die of heat related causes each year. We wanted to provide a way for users to still experience the great sunshine and weather without being absolutely scorched. As a result, we thought of an idea to find the best route for walking based on sunshine, shade and amenities. Heat shouldn't prevent you from doing your daily activities outside.

Furthermore, we wanted to take vulnerable people into account. Elders, people with disabilities and accessibility issues still deserve to go outside and experience the great sunshine. As a personal anecdote, one of us (team-mates) had a grandparent that wanted to go on a long walk. Taking the grandparent on a long, hot, walk with no signs of breaks was simply disastrous. Consequently, the idea of listing amenities such as public washrooms, water fountains and benches for breaks came up; leading to a being major feature within the project. The ability to also gauge how much water to bring to the trip was also an idea.

What it does

We were able to implement many custom features. The main one being custom shade calculations using various APIs. Then the coordinates were plotted to determine whether there was shade or not. Following that, Dijkstra's algorithm with custom weightings based on shade/no-shade was used to find the best route. Nearby amenities were also included with the routes.

How we built it

  • We used MapBox and ShadeMap API for the maps. Used OpenToronto API for the amenities and combined them into an HTML and Back-end. Used ngrok for API calls to the back-end.

Challenges we ran into

  • Math for polygons to get the buildings' shadows
  • Finding whether a coordinate is shaded or not
  • Implementing Dijkstra's algorithm
  • Coming up with an idea (the hardest part)
  • Deploying

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We were confidently able to create the least-shaded route which is the main part of the project and something unique.

What we learned

  • Teamwork (very important)
  • Adjusting to others' tech stacks
  • New tech stacks and algorithms
  • Communication and not being afraid to ask for help

What's next for Chill Path

We have a few additional things we couldn't completely implement on the web-app. The following list some of them:

  • A mobile app with real-time location update to your route
  • Temperature ratings along the route
  • Accounts to keep track of routes
  • Custom routing to prioritize amenities along the path
Share this project:

Updates