Trail Ease

Abstract

Trail Ease is a product developed for hikers and tourists of the Margalla Hills Trails, to help make the hiking experience more interactive and collaborative; where individuals with similar interests can hike together and share their experiences. This system especially supports the tourist and regular hikers of Margalla trails so that they can plan their hikes by acquiring information on trails like weather conditions and hike essentials etc. It provides an elaborate list of items that a hiker or tourist might need when trekking through the trails. It has many features such as trail maps using Google Map API (Offline Maps), viewing the weather forecast as well as the time of sunset and sunrise for the day, sending immediate SOS messages in case of emergency, and even making calls to emergency services such as the police, ambulance, or the fire brigade, etc where the network is available. Hikers can create group chats for planning the hike and going together on a decided date. Additionally, hikers can give feedback about their hiking experience, which can be very useful and interactive for future visitors. The feedback is of three types, 1) Reviews, which are general remarks about the trail and the hike; 2) Complaints, which are any unpleasant encounters that need to be highlighted in pictorial and textual form; and 3) Recommendations, which are constructive statements to better the condition of the trails. Recommendations have a polling system where users can vote to agree or disagree with the statement. Moreover, registered users of the application can also rate the trails through the star rating feature. Lastly, the admin can keep track of the active users on the hike. The users can set when they start and end their hike and the admin can keep track of them like so. Also, application is able to generate reports about the trail visitors on Daily, Weekly and Monthly basis.