Last weekend, we had the pleasure of participating in the Indiana AT&T IoT Civic Hackathon. This year’s theme was based on First Responders, and the combination of 4G LTE and FirstNet formed the backdrop for the hackathon. FirstNet (the first-ever communications platform dedicated to first responders) gives law enforcement, fire, and EMS personnel a highly-secure and always-on connection to the information they need to achieve their lifesaving mission. At this hackathon, we’ll be looking for mobile, IoT-inspired apps that can help them respond to emergencies, fight crime, and make our communities safer.
Our Goal
With success being defined as a mobile IoT app that enables first responders to better do their jobs, we not only wanted to succeed in building something using cool technologies, we also wanted to show that to build something from top to bottom, it takes more than just software; it takes ideation, hardware, soldering, backend & frontend expertise, and more. Building on that, our team was made up of individuals with various skillsets to showcase each of these areas of expertise from Indiana’s tech community.
Our Team
Joining Trek10, our team consisted of individuals from an assortment of Indiana-based tech companies that greatly complimented Trek10’s experience with designing and building serverless IoT solutions on AWS. Members of our team (pictured below) included Chris Dillow from Adesa, Randy Parmerlee and Drew Westrick from Glassboard, Chris Achard from Nanohop, Tyler Henrichs from Prysm, and myself ((@KenWin0x539)) - from Trek10.
Our Concept
Having known the general theme for the hackathon, we began with two ideas already in our hat, and with a healthy amount of ideation, conversation, and debating, we landed on what we would later call ONSET (On Scene Equipment Tracking). Our primary use case was anchored to the idea that EMTs would carry the ONSET device in a bag with a selection of critical items including both reusable items and consumables (medicine). As an item is consumed, it would be “scanned out,” which would automatically update the mobile app and a dashboard which displays the EMT’s location and current inventory of the bag (how many remaining consumables are in the bag, how many times items have been used, what items are missing/out of the bag, etc.).
Our Solution
Due to the makeup of our team, we were able build a completely serverless backend, and used this opportunity to combine some familiar technologies with bleeding edge AWS services. Our mangOH Red dev kit used Sierra Wireless AirVantage to push data into Amazon Kinesis Streams, from which we then used AWS Lambda to pull the data from the ingestion stream. From there, we cleaned up the data and pushed it to an additional Kinesis stream, where a second Lambda function pulled the data and pushed it to AWS IoT allowing the mobile app to receive real time updates on multiple topics. On top of that, we further utilized AWS by pushing the data into DynamoDB for use with our API, and that second Lambda mentioned above, it was also used to put data into M2X for dashboarding. Complimenting all of this with React Native for the mobile app and the Onyx Button for voice communications, we were able to produce a fully integrated application.
@OrionLabs This is ONSET. On Scene Equipment Tracking. Using #onyx real time voice technology. The medic has used Narcan and makes a request from the nearest colleague. This is made possible by a custom @ifttt applet and hardware that tracks the inventory of the medic bag.
Out of 30 total teams participating in the hackathon, our team took 3 prizes total, including Second Place “IoT,” “Best use of the AT&T Starter Kit”, and “Best Use of Onyx (Smart Walkie-Talkie) Button.”
Have questions, comments, or simply want to give praise for the team? Feel free to reach out to info@trek10.com.
