Have you seen the lines to get into Costco lately? How do you keep yourself and your families safe during this COVID-19 pandemic? While we are sheltered at home, we should be fine. However, when we go out for essential errands, such as grocery shopping, or getting supplies, we need to apply good social distancing techniques.
The problem is that you still need to go out once in a while to buy groceries or get supplies. How do you know how crowded it is at a particular location? We need to be proactive and know when is the safest time to run essential errands without having to bump into uncomfortable situations, such as facing too many people in one place. That’s where Crowd Alerts comes in.
We are building a new Social Distancing app, called Crowd Alerts, through which you can find out how crowded a place is BEFORE you head out. With Crowd Alerts, you can know how busy the shop you need to go to is and plan accordingly. We provide you with real-time information on how busy an establishment is at any given moment.
Crowd Data
There are numerous data sets available that describe how many people are present at a certain location, either at a given moment, or historically. Some of these data sets are available via public and commercial APIs, where others will be composed using our own proprietary data. We will use these data sets and Data Science algorithms to come up with a Crowd Index to classify the crowd density of a location.
The Crowd Alerts App
The app provides a simple user interface to ask the user where they plan to go. Using the crowd data sets, the app will then inform the user how crowded the requested place is, and possibly suggest alternatives if the place is too crowded. The app will also seek the user’s input to indicate how crowded it is at their current location. The app will be available on iOS, Android, as well as a responsive web app and will be free to use.
Volunteer Now!
We created Crowd Alerts to provide a public service to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. As such, we are looking for volunteers to help with Product Development, Project Management, Design, Marketing, Software Engineering, QA, as well as Funding for our servers. Our project is registered with Help with COVID, where you can apply to volunteer for this project. To volunteer, please Apply Here.
