Park Monitor

Update

While I haven't been able to get my AT&T kit working to complete this project I did work on a similar device for the Azure Pre-Build hackathon along with 4 other team members. We were able to get a working prototype up and running on the STMicro hardware they provided during the 3-hour hacking period and ended up placing 3rd in the event.

What if instead of waiting for a field to be open after a soccer game for your team to practice you could check your phone and find a park 10 minutes away where you could practice now? Maybe IoT can be more than industrial system monitoring. IoT provides the ability to make parks more accessible and better maintained while reducing costs for financially stressed park districts. Perhaps it can promote activity and use of a great resource: America's thousands of public parks.

Challenge

The goal of this project was to build a park monitoring system to address two cases experienced very often. The first pertains to the conditions of fields. This is very prominent in the Chicago Public Parks in the area where I live. Despite our generally flat topography the fields are below the area around them and commonly are where water collects after it rains. The fields flood and remain unusable for long periods of time. This can be very annoying when a group or team decides to go to a field to practice or play without checking in advance.

Upon arriving at a wet and unusable field practices and events have to be cancelled wasting everyone's time. An easy approach to mitigating this problem is to provide regular images of fields so that an organizer can evaluate the conditions and choose from one of the dozens of parks within a mile of where they are based on up to date information.

The other similar dilemma is arriving to find that the field is in use by another group. While these are not life threatening issues, making such a service available to Chicago's 2.5 million residents could increase the use of Public parks thus improving fitness and health. This could be encouraged through the use of pre-existing systems such as text, email, or social media notifications that tell people who have subscribed in the area when a field is not in use to encourage them to go outside instead of watching another video.

Solution

The proposed solution to this problem is a device that would provide images of a park or field, perform analysis and provide them to users along with updates and notifications to increase park use and fitness levels well decreasing frustration over arriving at a field in bad shape. By connecting Chicago's over 600 public parks and making the information easy to access and understand IoT can encourage and more efficiently use park space.

It also could eventually, if adapted, provide an interface to detect and report reoccurring poor conditions to the Park District to have improvements performed. The IoT aspect could later be integrated into a more complete system with the ability to schedule events and other features to encourage park use. What makes it such a great application is the ability to expand and integrate it into potentially over a million people's daily lives in one city.