The problem Evade solves

We decided to take up PROBLEM STATEMENT 5 which was based upon the health hazards caused by cell phone towers and how we can build something to solve that issue. We researched a bit upon the topic and found out that it indeed is a serious issue, also because cell phone towers is a relatively new technology, so there's not much evidence or data to prove its impact on health. So, its always a good idea to take precautions. That's what we've made in this hackathon. Our project is called evade, which literally means escape. We let our users use it and find out the number of towers they've in a radius of 3 kilometres.

For this purpose, we have used publicly available api of OpenCelliD, that has the data of all towers around the world. For the sake of this project, we've used India's data specifically, so any user residing in india can find out the number of towers they've around them, either by entering the location or by using GPS. Then, they can know if they're at a high, medium or low risk, and moreover can learn about the preventive measures they can take in order to stay safe from the radiations they might get exposed to.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a couple of challenges while completing this project. One major challenge was to find dataset that we can use for the proof of concept, so we had to spend a lot of time in finding the right dataset, but eventually we found the most suitable one. Other task was to make the calculation fast, since our data had more than 10 columns and more than 10 lakh entries, we had to trim the columns, and use the fastest possible algorithms to find out the results efficiently. We also struggled a bit while loading up the map in result screen, since it was following http protocol and we wanted the whole app to be protocoled over https, so we had to find out how it can be solved, and finally found our way by upgrading the library to its https counterpart. Few other small challenges were deploying our flask app on heroku as well as making the screens completely responsive for different screen sizes. But we are really happy and feeling accomplished that we were able to complete it all from ideation to final product in 3 days of time!