Disaster Global

Inspiration

With all the disasters happening all over the world, be it floods in India, hurricanes in the United States or earthquakes in Japan. All over the world, we are affected by natural disasters throughout the year. The effort comes afterward in the form of search and rehabilitation operations. During the processing of building the skill, I came to know how many natural disasters happen all over the world, from low severity to disastrous nature is always in motion.

What it does

Disaster Global is a smart assistant for Alexa, its purpose is to provide information about the latest natural disasters happening all over the world and about disasters geographically nearest to the user.

How we built it

We made one team of two members and got ideation done Did research on available open source data about the real-time disasters happening all around the world (link: http://www.gdacs.org/) Went through the rules and procedures required to participate Started work on the backend for storing our valuable data using MySQL Designed the VUI and storyline for our skill

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Challenges we ran into

We faced many challenges while competing in this hackathon. We would like to mention some of them: First and foremost challenge was that we heard of this opportunity just around 20 days before the last date of submission. However, we thank Devpost for providing such a clear understanding of everything that is required to take part in Amazon Alexa Skills Challenge: Tech For Good. It helped us a lot. This is the first Alexa skill that we built to participate in such a big hackathon. We are very excited. Ideation of an Alexa Skill that would actually be a Tech For Good.

Luckily, we overcome all those challenges and have tried our best to come up with a skill for social cause making the best use of open source data.

What we learned

To our amazement, we learned how many disasters happen all over the world from low severity to disastrous. There is almost always a storm that is brewing up somewhere in the seas or some region shaking due to earthquakes.

What's next for Disaster Global

This is the first iteration of the skill and we intend to provide more information that can enable users and NGO’s to help the affected people. Be sure to provide Disaster Global access to your location in the companion app.

Acknowledgments

The data for the alerts are provided by GDACS. GDACS is a cooperation framework between the United Nations, the European Commission and disaster managers worldwide to improve alerts, information exchange and coordination in the first phase after major sudden-onset disasters.

Built With

• amazon-alexa
• amazon-aurora
• amazon-lambda
• mysql
• node.js