H^3 App: Blackberry Highway Exit Helper for Hungry Travelers

Mentor: Praveen Madiraju

Approach: Design and implementation of an embedded application that works with global positioning system data and attraction databases.

Summary: Current GPS devices and smart phones provide simple on-the-road services such as finding the restaurant nearest to where a person is located. However, when a person is driving on a highway, such applications fall short because the nearest food spot may be at a place that is not readily accessible from the highway, or from the current location on the highway. This project proposes the H^3 application for locating food spots based on nearest exits on the highway that a person is traveling. This application will be implemented on the Blackberry platform.

Implementing the application provides challenges including finding coordinates for highway exits, calculating nearest food spots based on coordinates of the exits, and presenting information in a convenient format for small devices.

Once the framework is laid out, this infrastructure can have significant impact, with spin-off applications for finding nearest hotels and gas stations based on the current highway route.

Students on this project will learn about developing for the Blackberry embedded platform, will work with acquiring and processing GPS data, and will prototype a suitable embedded user interface.