The problem Close-O-Meter solves

Health being our first priority,this project aims to solve the problem of frequent human contact at heavily crowded places in the wake of the Corona Virus Pandemic and help minimize social contanct
Current Scenario

• If we wish to visit a restaurant/ grocery store/salon, we would want to select a place where there are very few people at real-time so as to avoid crowds and waiting and hence to avoid viral exposure.
• Alternatively, if there is a particular hour of the day when there are very few people at the store/salon/restaurant, we would select that hour to visit the place.
• Right now, there is no solution for this problem, that is, there is no way we can find out which place has how much customer-density at real time as well as any live updates about the place regarding sanitary measures followed there.

Proposed Solution
Close-o-meter is an interactive web platform, where users can get to know live updates about crowds as well people’s reviews about the sanitary conditions at different places like restaurants, events, stores, malls etc and hence choose the place safest to them.

• Users can track people at different locations by visualising it in maps having clusters of crowd marking them with red, if number of people/area density is high, yellow for moderate density and green for safest density at different locations.
• Users can explore different restaurants and dining places and check-in by scanning qr code at the restaurant, other users will be able to see the number of people currently present at the restaurant.
• After authenticating through Google oauth and checking in, users can now see live updates about the sanitary conditions of the restaurant, people’s reviews and ratings, and number of people checking in at regular intervals providing better user experience.
• For checking out, users can provide feedback and ratings to the place to help others track the safety at different places.

Challenges we ran into

• Framework of Project: We knew the problem and the solution but structuring that solution into a platform where it can prove beneficial for both customers and as well as owners required lots of brainstorming and discussions over critical features that should be provided by our platform which could fulfill our objective was a challenging part.
• Google Maps API: Our Initial plan was to implement a map which could give a brief view about different places and actual crowd present there with the help of google places and map javascript APIs but that requires a billing account on each project as per the new policies and updates which posed a great problem during our development of the project.
  PostgresSQL Cloud: We used postgresql as our database and for making our solution scalable. Having locally setup database was a problem in a way that we had to share our updates with others and our team members. We solved it by hosting our database on cloud using ElephantSQL.

Future Scope:

• Keeping in mind that the pandemic won’t last forever, we can use this project to help track crowd for reducing waiting time or queues of people at different locations.
• Feedback and reviews about safety and sanitation will also help increase credibility of different restaurants, stores etc.
• Different Restaurants, stores and events can be registered on this platform to cover a lot of places and hence creating greater impact.