Description as a Tweet:

Hospital Locator is a web application that tells users the hospitals that are closest to their location and direct them to the hospitals, allowing patients in emergency situations to get to the hospitals much faster, which would make sure they get necessary treatment.

Inspiration:

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, locating nearby hospitals is very crucial to provide immediate treatment to the patient. The situation inspired us to make a simple yet elegant solution of searching hospitals based on user's location.

What it does:

Our project is a web application that integrates Radar.io and Google Maps JavaScript API to locate nearby hospitals. It provides both: information about the hospitals and their GPS on google maps based on your current location. The application also provides directions from the user's current location to the hospitals. It has a simple interface to make it easy to navigate the features on the page.

How we built it:

Our team utilized HTML/CSS and JavaScript through the Svelte framework for developing our web application. We used Svelte instead of traditional React because Svelte uses Real DOM, which makes the application much faster than that build by React, which uses Virtual DOM. Our application is also not too complicated, which means that the high performance and large packages of React are not necessary. Moreover, Radar.io is used to find the closest hospitals, and Google Maps JavaScript API from Google Cloud is utilized to find and display the current location of the user, display the hospitals found by Radar.io on Map, and give users directions to the hospitals.

Technologies we used:

• HTML/CSS
• Javascript
• Misc

Challenges we ran into:

Radar.io, Maps JavaScript API, Svelte, and GitHub Collaboration are technologies that we have never utilized before this project. Our team overcame this situation by spending time to read the documentations and experiment with the API before implementing the project. Online communication is also one of the challenges that our team faced. We created a Discord server and had voice chat and Zoom meetings regularly throughout the hackathon to solve this problem.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

We are excited and thankful that we were able to participate in HackUMass and create a project together. Accomplishments we are proud of while developing this project are that we learnt new frameworks and technologies, and most importantly, got the opportunity to create a meaningful project with our peers.

What we've learned:

We, as a team, learned many valuable skills during the development of this web application. We learnt many technologies, such as Radar.io and Google Maps JavaScript API. Moreover, our team members have learnt numerous soft skills, such as communication and social skills, leadership, and time management, which are significant for us as future software engineers.

What's next:

We would add more features such as allowing users to request emergency health services to nearby hospitals, locate and manage mental resources, provide more options of means of transportations (expanding the options beyond walking and driving by bikes and cars), and implement more navigation tools (like avoiding crowded roads, toll roads, etc.)
Moreover, we would make a mobile app version of this application, to provide the user more flexibility.

Built with:

Our team utilized HTML/CSS and JavaScript through the Svelte framework for developing our web application. Moreover, Radar.io is utilized to find the closest hospitals, and Google Maps JavaScript API from Google Cloud is utilized to find and display the current location of the user, display the hospitals found by Radar.io on Map, and give users directions to go to the hospitals.

Prizes we're going for:

• Best Documentation
• Best Venture Pitch
• Best Web Hack
• Funniest Hack
• Best Healthcare Hack
• Best Beginner Software Hack
• Best Beginner Web Hack
• Most Creative Radar.io Hack
• Best Use of Google Cloud

Chien Nguyen
Aditya Maheshwari
Anh Tran

Table TBD