During my daily summer commute with the NJ Transit Rail, I noticed a significant issue. If you close the app after checking Schedules or DepartureVision and then depart from a train, it becomes challenging to access current trip updates. This caused problems for me and fellow commuters. Many passengers would either take quick naps or be unfamiliar with the route, leading them to ask about the next stop or their final station.
The application provides an option to start alerts on a trip which will then give detailed status of the current trip in the form of a notification panel/widget on the lock screen of the user's mobile.
We started by analyzing the problem using the NJ Transit datasets and describing potential solutions for it. Then we went on to design UI components using JavaFX. Once the UI was designed, we started to design and code the backend aspect using Java. We used Git to collaborate and track changes.
Our major challenge was analyzing the data and cleaning it up to extract meaningful information that would be used by our application.
We learned different approaches to solving problems or problems that were solved previously using data. We learned how data analysis is crucial for innovation in every field.
We would like to test our idea in real-time and solve issues that we might face. Finally, host the notification panel/widget feature on the official NJ Transit application.