Sunny | Let's go to the Beach!
The Challenge | Let's go to the Beach!
ProTan
ProTan is a mobile application focused to help beach lovers to surf or swim in clean unpolluted waters, and get tan without the fear of the UV overexposure!
Background
As the summer season approaches, everyone prepares their swimsuits, surf boards and gathers friends to play beach volley and compete with the waves. And most importantly, everyone wants to enjoy their time at the beach, without worrying about any possible hazard that may appear at that time.
Not everyone is informed that exposing their skin for a long time on the sun can cause skin cancer because of the UV radiation. Also, not everyone is informed that even the sunscreen cannot protect the skin from the UV radiation for a long time period.
In addition to that, a small percentage of the population that visits local beaches is aware of the Harmful Algal Blooms, which can be caused by the high concentration of the algs in a small area, resulting to toxin emission into the water, which can cause serious damage to the skin and to the organs as well.
We wanted to relieve the people from concerns like these, making them think only about getting tan and having a great time at the beach.
To ensure that, we decided to build something that everyone can keep it on themselves at any time, something to inform them about the beaches they want to visit, the potential hazards they may face at these locations and the precautions they need to take in order to protect themselves and have a great time at the beach.
Get tan like a pro!
We built the mobile application called ProTan for this purpose. It will allow the people to stay informed about the hazards they are about to face at their favorite beach, like updated UV radiation at that zone (Weather it's harmful or not) and information about the water pollution by the algal blooms. In an interactive way, it can show the user weather the beach is marked as safe to visit, or as hazardous.
Besides that, the application can recommend local beaches to the user that are marked as safe to visit (With low UV radiation and low concentration of harmful algal blooms). Recommending safe beaches comes with a great feature as well, a recommendation system, that tells the user how many hours of exposure to sun is safe, at which time of day is the safest to visit the beach and even gives recommendations for how many times to put sunscreen or what kind of sunglasses to wear.
In this way, everyone can be sure to pick the safest beach, not only to have fun swimming and surfing, but to get tan like a pro as well.
How it was made?
The application is cross platform, in order to be used by larger population. It is based on a custom built API that fetches real time data from OpenWeatherMap API for the UV index at a specific location, and also fetches dataset provided by Nasa Earth Observations about the algal blooms concentration around the globe, analyzes the data and returns the needed information and recommendations, that will be processed by the application and displayed to the user interactively.
API: https://github.com/njofce/api
Aplication: https://github.com/blag0j/sunny-apps
Resources
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/UVB/uvb...
https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dataprod/chlor_a....
https://weather.com/maps/current-uv-index
https://www.epa.gov/sunsafety/uv-index-scale-1
SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.