CyberAid

The challenge

Because of climate change, Natural disasters are one of the biggest problems in society. During the last decade around 0.1% of all deaths were caused by natural disasters. And even though nowadays we have really good technology we are not able to solve this problem. As a computer science student, I couldn’t let this happen.

The solution

Two years ago, I came home after a normal day in high school, I sat on the sofa, and I started watching this documentary, about how some animals are able to detect natural disasters, and I was wondering… Why don’t we do the same thing? Well, First of all, How do they do it?, how are animals able to predict natural disasters? Well, when a natural disaster, like an earthquake, is approaching, it generates pressure variations. Some animals, like birds, detect those variations days before the disaster, and then, they fly away, and they are safe. I want to do the same thing... But how can we do it? After a long research I realized that we can use the piezoelectric effect. But… What is the piezoelectric effect? This is a property that some materials have, that when they receive mechanical tension, they generate energy. So we can use the pressure variations as mechanical tension, and we can use the energy generated, to activate a circuit, that alert the population from the disaster. That way, Based on this inspiration, I created a prototype which was able to detect natural disasters as animals do. But this was not enough for me, because the difference between a human and a bird is that one is intelligent and the other one is the human. So I decided to implement machine learning algorithms in this idea to make this solution even more efficient and save millions of lives