ENGS 89/90 Reports

Year of Graduation

2023

Project Advisor

Mattias Fitzpatrick

Instructor

Solomon Diamond

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

2023

Abstract

Over 11.5 million people in the United States who are deaf and/or hard of hearing are unable to seek emergency help via a conventional 911 voice call. accesSOS provides a text-to-911 platform for members of this community. They have developed a progressive web application (PWA) and native iOS and Android mobile apps, that collect emergency information from users via an icon-based user interface (UI). However, their platform lacked a mechanism for including altitude information in the geolocation data regarding the user’s location in a multi-story building that is relayed to emergency responders when the user tries to contact 911 via the app. Without elevation data, emergency responders often have to conduct floor-by-floor searches for victims, a time-consuming process that puts both victims and emergency responders at greater risk. Our ENGS 90 team has prototyped a solution that utilizes the barometer sensor of a user's iPhone, in combination with elevation data from Google Map API and weather data from NOAA, to estimate the floor number of where a user is located in a multi-story building. For the floor estimation, we used pressure data from the barometer sensor of users’ iPhones to help us estimate the desired elevation and translate this elevation to a floor level estimate using a conversion algorithm. For the interface, we created several wireframe designs following accesSOS’s existing iOS UI and then conducted user tests to finally succeed in meeting our primary requirements that we set for ENGS 90.

Download

Restricted

Available to Dartmouth community via local IP address.

Share

COinS