Last weekend Ciklum, one of the largest outsourcing companies in Ukraine, hosted Mobile Rocks hackathon. The event was organized by Devrain Solutions and wp7rocks.com. Over 30 teams of mobile devs participated in the hackathon.
As every hackathon, Mobile Rocks was based on having teams work prior on their idea and then use 24 hours to implement them. Except for participants, organizers have involved various IT-experts to advise teams on technical issues and killer features.
We are happy to announce that David Maiboroda, our Junior Android developer, was a part of the winning team. Together with Sergey Kozyrev (server part) the team has created a mobile app called ‘Friend in Need’. The main purpose of this app is to notify your significant others when you get in trouble (car accident, street fight or anything else). David was responsible for creating an Android client. The initial version on an app sends an alert message when a person falls down.
Background
Once Sergey was walking on the street and saw an unconscious man on the ground at the bus stop. He was well-dressed and there was nothing suspicious about him but people were just walking by without even looking in his direction. Sergey was struck with the idea: in some situations you can’t help yourself, so, you need to be able to reach out to other people. That’s how the guys came up with the service that will enable you to send alerts to other people when you get in some kind of trouble.
Solution
To implement their idea David’s team has used neural network on python. First, they had to train the network: for 15 times they’ve fallen down imitating as if they’re fainting. Accelerometer measures the acceleration on the XYZ axes and records coordinates during the fall and the collision with the ground (and a few seconds after in order to understand whether the person is still moving or not). Then received data was transferred to the network as the coordinates of the real fall.
Approximate values of accelerometer when the phone is in your pocket were taken as a basis. Then the app stores data on the acceleration and in case of sudden change the coordinates, they are sent to the server which compares them with the coordinates of the real fall and notifies mobile app. If a man really falls client takes, its GPS coordinates and makes an URL on Google Maps, shortens URL (and text message) & sends everything to AtomPark service from which SMS is sent to the person’s contacts.
Testing the app, guys tried to just throw down a smartphone and have it hit the ground. However, without an actual person its trajectory and acceleration are absolutely different, so the system responds FALSE. So, their system works really well 🙂
Tough competitions deserve valuable prizes. As an award, the winners received a bunch of useful books, 10 glasses of beer each and an annual subscription to tech courses at Microsoft!
Our congratulations to David! We are so proud of you 🙂