Inspiration
Our inspiration stemmed from the growing number of traffic deaths to pedestrians. Over the past years, the number of pedestrian deaths has been increasing. In 2019, pedestrian deaths were up 5 percent compared to the year prior, with 6590 pedestrians killed, the highest number since 1988. According to researchers, it is concluded that cellphones are one of the leading reasons for this increase. Cellphones distract people from being aware of their surroundings, therefore, increasing the main cause of pedestrian accidents: failure to yield the right of way. Our app aims to solve this problem by inhibiting users from looking at their phone while walking and constantly reminding users not to use their phone while walking. As a result, we believe that this will decrease the number of pedestrian deaths and, therefore, increase motor safety.
What it does
It tracks your speed in mph and kph. By using the Location API provided by the Android Studio, we calculate the speed and distance in which the person travels through the methods available.
How we built it
We mainly constructed our app through Android Studio. The majority of our code was constructed from Java.
Challenges we ran into
One of the challenges that we ran into was finding a way to integrate both the notification channel, foreground system, and speedometer together in order to make our app. Another challenge was getting familiar with the syntax itself as we had never used APIs related to app construction and Google services. (We didn't have enough time to integrate the notifications with the speedometer)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of being able to make create two different projects: one being the speedometer and the other being a foreground notification service. This is because we had no knowledge of the android service and the extent to which it could create.
What we learned
We learned the basics of Android Studio and the general layout of the program. Furthermore, we learned how to integrate projects together through the various channels and classes. Specifically, we learned how to apply the location services by calculating the speed of a person.
What's next for Walk Safe
The next steps for Walk Safe would be to program a system in which only certain apps are available when the app is running/detecting walking. This would create an environment where pedestrians would be discouraged to open up other apps and look at their phones while walking. Additionally, it needs redesigning in order to appeal to more potential users in the future.
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