Quake Alert

Quake Alert is an app that will provide the last location of the user to family members, in the event of a natural disaster via the Twillio API.

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HackRPI2019

Our team was inspired by the theme of "Natural Disaster and Mitigation" because of the recent forest fires in California. We wanted to create something that could be useful during natural disasters. The loss of power is common after natural disasters and if cell phone towers are operational, they're flooded with a constant stream of calls. After discussing potential projects with IBM mentors, we decided to create an app to help individuals find their loved ones in the event of a serious disaster. The app could also be used to provide first responders with information on the last locations of civilians. For the sake of time, we decided to focus on earthquakes scenarios for family members.

The majority of our team consisted of first-time hackers. One of the things we had to figure out quickly was how to divide tasks amongst ourselves. To create our app, 2 group members focused on the front-end, while the other 2 group members focused on the back-end. We utilized a variety of tools to create Quake Alert. To store of all our work, we used a GitHub repository. To save user information, we used the IBM Cloudant database. To host our website, we used a Google Cloud Compute Instance. Earthquake data was received via the API provided by the United States Geological Survey. We used Python to extract data from the USGS API and for creating/editing documents in the IBM Cloudant database. To send notifications, to potential family members, we used the Twillio API with Python.

The challenges we faced included the obvious time-constraint. A majority of our time was focused on research for technologies that we were unfamiliar with. Debugging also took a decent amount of time. Especially, with the Twillio API since with the free trial we could only send SMS messages to pre-registered users. Another challenge we faced was integrating the front-end features and the back-end features. We should have started testing the integration earlier.

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