Green Path

Every day, millions of urban commuters travel through localized hotspots of severe air pollution without realizing it. Standard navigation apps prioritize the fastest route, inadvertently directing pedestrians and cyclists through high-exposure corridors that can worsen respiratory health over time. Our team, DDevs (Devansh Goyal, Bhumik Aggarwal, Dev Chhikara, and Devansh), set out to solve this problem for the WeMakeDevs Environmental Hacks hackathon.

Our solution is Green Path—a localized air quality tracking and gamified eco-routing web application. It empowers commuters to actively choose cleaner transit paths and incentivizes sustainable travel habits. You can check out our live application here:Green Path Web App .

In this post, I will share how we brought Green Path to life and the AWS services that made it possible.

Building a real-time, hyperlocal routing application requires a robust, scalable, and responsive backend. To achieve this, we relied heavily on the AWS ecosystem, specifically utilizing AWS Amplify to streamline our development process.

Here is a breakdown of our technical stack and how we integrated AWS:

We needed a seamless way to deploy our web application and ensure reliable, fast access for our users. We utilized the AWS Amplify CLI and open-source libraries to connect our frontend to our cloud backend effortlessly. For hosting, AWS Amplify Hosting provided the perfect solution. It allowed us to deploy the live application securely and reliably, ensuring that Green Path is always available for commuters on the go.

Because Green Path includes personalized features like saved routes, gamified milestones, and individual user metrics, security and user management were paramount. We integrated Amazon Cognito to handle all user authentication and sign-ups. Cognito provided a secure, scalable way to manage user profiles and safeguard personal data, allowing us to focus on building the app's core features rather than worrying about the intricacies of building an authentication system from scratch.

To make Green Path work, we needed to store and rapidly retrieve a variety of data types, including user preferences, route history, and gamified achievements. We chose Amazon DynamoDB as our backend NoSQL database. Its fast, predictable performance and seamless scalability made it the ideal choice for creating a highly responsive data foundation. DynamoDB ensures that as our user base grows and more routes are logged, the application remains quick and efficient.

Participating in the WeMakeDevs Environmental Hacks event was an incredible experience for the DDevs team. We wanted to build something that tackled a real-world environmental issue while providing actionable, localized solutions.

Working together, we divided the tasks to play to our strengths—from designing the eco-routing algorithms and integrating the real-time AQI data, to building out the AWS backend architecture. The hackathon provided a fantastic platform to push our skills, particularly in deploying comprehensive cloud solutions using AWS.

Green Path is more than just a navigation app; it’s a tool to help people make healthier, more sustainable choices in their daily lives. By prioritizing air quality over just speed and distance, we hope to reduce toxic exposure for vulnerable groups and everyday commuters alike.

Building this platform would not have been as seamless without the power and scalability of AWS services like Amplify, Cognito, and DynamoDB. They provided the solid foundation we needed to focus on solving the problem at hand.

We are excited about the future of Green Path and are incredibly proud of what the DDevs team accomplished during this hackathon!