Inspiration
We believe there's power in knowledge. So when designing our connected home experience, we asked ourselves, "How can we leverage a smart home's full potential to empower homeowners?" Well, we also believe there is power in numbers, so why stop at connecting the home when we can connect a whole neighborhood. The power of the A6 platform allows us to gain real-time insight about what's going on, not only in a single home, but throughout the entire community. By connecting homeowners with this knowledge, neighbors can work together to not only improve their own homes, but to improve their community as a whole.
What it does
Our ConnectedCommunity app leverages the anonymous connected home data of a whole community and presents it to homeowners to help them be safer, healthier, and smarter members of the community. Using Allstate's A6 platform, we display valuable data about your own home right alongside important information about your community. Are you using more or less water than your neighborhood average? And how can you reduce your water waste and contribute to a greener community? Has there been crime in your neighborhood recently? What steps can you take to make sure your home and family are safe? These are all questions we answer with our unique connected community interface.
Each ConnectedCommunity homeowner is a member of a community, along with all of the ConnectedCommunity platform members in their location. Homeowners connect their home with the A6 platform and receive valuable information about their homes as well as homes around them. Connected Community communicates information in two main ways: the Community Bulletin and the Homeowner Hub.
The Community Bulletin displays whats going on where the homeowner lives. With updates on recent happenings and community statistics, users can see the health of their neighborhood, along with relevant options to take action. Were there 4 fires in the last month? Maybe you want to set up an alert when your smoke detector is low. Is your community using more water than usual? Get alerts when you run over a certain water level to help your community be greener.
The Homeowner Hub displays more personal information in the context of your community as well as challenges and incentives to help you be a smarter homeowner. How much electricity are you personally using compared to your neighborhood average? If you don't leave your house with your doors unlocked for a whole month, we'll give you secure homeowner credit. We give homeowners information and incentive to improve their communities by making smarter decisions.
We implement a rules system to not only display connected community information to users, but also give them options to leverage the information. Users can access sensor states and create rules for receiving alerts or making emergency calls. For example, if I leave the home with my water on, I can set a rule to notify a trusted neighbor to stop water waste.
How I built it
Our ConnectedCommunity system works accesses the A6 system through a central server which servers user mobile apps based on their registered community group and household. When a homeowner connects to the ConnectedCommunity network, they join with a groupid (represents communities of homes) and a sensorid (their personal home). The server is already subscribed to the homeowners A6 groupid and stores the group's sensor data in a database. When a user connects, the server serves the anonymized community statistics and personal home statistics to their mobile app. We also set up a socket for dynamic data updates. When A6 posts to the server, the server updates the database, and serves the changes to community members mobile apps in real time.
For the server, we chose to use node.js/Express for it's simple and efficient HTTP routing. We used the socket.io library to setup a real-time connection between the server and app.
For our app, we chose to develop on the Android mobile platform.
Challenges I ran into
We found that fitting the A6 API to our "Connected Community" concept took a bit of creativity. We chose to represent our communities with A6 groups and use a single A6 sensor for each home, with each sensor sending multiple different IoT events. With this concept, each sensor has a very long and difficult to manage log of events that turned out to be difficult to manage, process and parse.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud of coming up with a novel way to use the internet of things and connected home to improve our communities and keep people safer.
What I learned
We learned that spending the extra time to solidify a good concept is always worth it. We learned that having a lot of data isn't inherently useful, it's what knowledge is in the data and how it can be leveraged that is valuable to improving our world.
What's next for ConnectedCommunity
With more than a couple of hours to work with, we believe that we could turn ConnectedCommunity into a complete and refined product, that could actually be deployed and used by millions of Allstate homeowners. We would love to work with Allstate further to extend the reach of our ConnectedCommunity concept.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.