Create a mobile app that shows physical stores nearby and their current and upcoming customer capacity utilization in order to avoid crowdedness
Describe your idea
To minimize the risk of infection, everyone is required to keep physical distance and avoid crowded places such as supermarkets.
Since delivery services such as Amazon Fresh are currently working at full capacity, visits to physical stores are still necessary.
Shops have quickly adapted to this situation by limiting the number of customers allowed inside, resulting in long waiting lines outside the store.
By leveraging publicly available APIs, it is possible to look up nearby supermarkets and show their live customer capacity utilization. This allows users to go out shopping only when one of their nearby shops is currently sparsely visited by other customers, minimizing waiting time, maximizing shop utilization, and significantly lowering exposure to potentially infectious people.
For this pitch, we implement this idea as quikkauf, this app runs on Android and iOS. A working MVP is ready for testing, debugging, extending, and improving on this repo: https://gitlab.com/gsgou/quikkauf
Which of the four categories for submissions does this address?
This app will reduce the spread of the virus by recommending the best times for keeping physical distance in public spaces such as supermarkets.
What kind of backing would this kind of project need in addition to what's already being provided?
Our MVP currently depends on Google Maps APIs, Places in particular, for querying nearby shops and their expected and live busy times. As this API has a pricing threshold, financial backing or free-of-charge Google API support is needed once API rate limits are surpassed.
What are open questions you need help with?
Planned architecture
The quikkauf MVP is a Xamarin Forms-based application. It runs standalone and currently doesn't require a server backend for central coordination.
Data requirements
Data from supermarkets retrieved via Google Places API (e.g. popular times, waiting time, time spent, live status).
Short description of the benefits
Many public places are currently closed and only system-relevant facilities such as supermarkets are open to provide people with things they need daily.
By scheduling customer visits evenly, it is possible to reduce physical interaction between customers and shop employees alike. Additionally, customers will enjoy less waiting times and shorter queues, further reducing the time spent in potentially infectious areas.
This idea is complementary to the waiting list idea presented in #18. One advantage of our idea is that it does not require shop owners to cooperate or be aware of our scheduling solution, as our idea leverages data already available, removing any adoption barriers for our solution to work.
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