Soteira

Inspiration

Esri's traffic accident analytics inspired an app that keeps you safer when you're out on the road. Joe Nash's application which took you through better lit streets was another source of our inspiration.

How it works

Soteira finds your current location data (HTML5 Geolocation) and then sends it to a JavaScript method which finds a 5 mile radius around you. It then pulls the number of crime incidents in your proximity from police.data API, and displays this to you in the form of a plottable.js graph and a few colourful, useful graphics.

Depending on the number of crimes in your area, Soteira will send you and or your emergency contact (e.g. a parent) a Cristiano warning through MMS by Twilio.

Challenges I ran into

At first we wanted to make this an Android app which would continually pull your location and send out an MMS if you entered a "bad" location, but we have had limited experience with Android development and so decided to switch to a Web App.

Esri was a great inspiration for our project, but we were unable to pull in relevant data for our project in this timeframe.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to use Twilio successfully for the first time, and several of our group members learned PHP. We're proud to have an App that can legitimately help people with real data, to possibly reassure worried parents and prevent some crime.

Also very happy to have implemented Cristiano's Face API

What I learned

PHP, Twilio, data.police API, bit of Android Development, Webapp Development, teamwork, sources of API

What's next for Soteira

We look to expand the app to use Esri's traffic accident information. We also want to go further into analytics about types of crime to provide more feedback to the user, and potentially prevent and reduce crime as whole. Porting Soteira into an Android/iOS app is another possible goal.