The problem EVAC solves

Imagine with us the after-course of a natural calamity. Naturally, a calamity brings a state of immense panic, with people running here and there with no clue. After some time, The rescue teams are called. Now, while the teams are trained to handle these situations, they have no information about the number of people inside the premises, their whereabouts and the ones needing immediate attention. This whole process of rescuing people is not optimal as the teams go into search uninformed of the victim's needs. Through our solution, we have tried to solve the problem of accurate headcount in the face of calamity, faster response time to attend to victims, end-to-end communication with the respective authorities and location mapping of the people who need attention.

The app will have two modes:

User:
The user will have to log in just once with their details, following which, whenever they step out, the map will automatically track their location whenever they enter an outlet. The WebSockets connection will ensure that a live count of the number of people in the particular outlet is maintained. In the face of calamity, EVAC will provide the authorised personnel and rescue authorities with the live count of the people on the premises. As a person reaches a safe space or exits the n-meter radius of the outlet, the live count will be updated accordingly. Further, if any person is stuck/injured, they can communicate directly with the authorities through the SOS functionality.

Admin:
The concerned authority of the outlet will have to register themselves into the application just once with parameters like radius, working hours, etc. Following this, their outlet will be available on the map. Whenever a person/employee walks into their outlet, the counter will be updated on the backend-only visible to a set of authorised people. Now, as a calamity strikes - the live counter will be shared with government rescue agencies and the authorities will have access to the locations.

Challenges we ran into

The major challenges we ran into during the course of the Hackathon are as follows:

1. Figuring out the flow of the app to minimize the reaction time since we had to consider a lot of factors
   How did we solve it: Once we organized everything with the help of a flow chart, things got a lot easier
   2)Finding a free Map API for our functionality and plotting the coordinates of the users as they move in and out
   How we solved it: We eventually found a functional free API, and we figured that a REST API would help us.