HeatRoute: Smarter Routes for a Hotter World
Extreme heat is changing how we experience everyday journeys, yet most navigation apps prioritize speed and distance. HeatRoute explores a new approach to pedestrian navigation that estimates relative heat exposure, compares safer walking routes, and helps people make informed trade-offs between travel time and thermal comfort—with explainable estimates and AWS-powered infrastructure.
AWS SBG lead,kerala,founded first aws sbg @kerala
HeatRoute: Rethinking Navigation in a World That Is Getting Hotter
What if the safest way to your destination wasn't the fastest route, but the route that exposed you to less heat?
Track: Heat & Water
Project: HeatRoute — Thermal-Aware Navigation
Event: WeMakeDevs Bharat Builds Tour — Environmental Hacks
1. The Problem Hiding in Our Everyday Journeys
Imagine walking from your college to the nearest bus stop on a scorching afternoon.
Your navigation app gives you a route. It calculates the distance, estimates your arrival time, and directs you through the streets that get you there efficiently.
But there is something it might not tell you.
One route takes you through a wide, exposed road with little shade. Another takes a few minutes longer but passes through tree-lined streets and shaded pedestrian paths.
Both lead to the same destination. Both might have similar reported air temperatures. Yet the experience of walking along them could be dramatically different.
Our navigation systems understand distance. But do they understand the environmental conditions we experience along the way?
Extreme heat is no longer merely a weather inconvenience. It affects outdoor workers, delivery personnel, pedestrians, cyclists, students, and millions of people who cannot simply remain indoors when temperatures rise.
For these people, choosing a route is not just a question of how quickly they can arrive. It is also a question of how much avoidable heat exposure they experience before getting there.
Weather applications can communicate temperature and forecasts. Navigation applications can calculate routes. Shade maps can reveal aspects of the urban environment.
But there is an important decision connecting all three:
Given the current environmental conditions, which safe route should I take, and is a small increase in travel time worth a reduction in estimated heat exposure?
That is the problem HeatRoute is designed to address.
2. Introducing HeatRoute
HeatRoute is a thermal-aware pedestrian navigation system that estimates relative outdoor heat exposure across candidate routes and helps people choose a practical balance between safety, thermal exposure, and travel time.
Its central idea is simple:
Traditional navigation helps you get there faster. HeatRoute helps you make a more heat-aware decision about how to get there.
Rather than replacing established navigation platforms, HeatRoute introduces an additional decision-making layer: environmental exposure.
It evaluates candidate pedestrian routes using available weather and geospatial information, estimates their relative thermal exposure, applies pedestrian-safety constraints, and presents understandable trade-offs.
A user should not have to interpret several weather variables, inspect satellite imagery, or manually compare street conditions. HeatRoute translates those inputs into a practical decision.
The goal is not to find the mathematically coolest path at any cost.
The goal is to find a safe, practical route with lower estimated thermal exposure, while allowing the user to decide how much additional travel time is acceptable.
3. From Weather Information to Actionable Intelligence
HeatRoute is built around a distinction that shapes the entire product:
Knowing the weather is not the same as understanding exposure during a journey.
Air temperature provides only part of the picture. Humidity, solar exposure, wind, shade, surface characteristics, and time spent outdoors can all influence the conditions a pedestrian experiences.
Consider two candidate routes.
The first is shorter but includes long, exposed segments with little vegetation.
The second is slightly longer but offers more shade and less estimated solar exposure.
A conventional distance-based comparison may favor the first. HeatRoute evaluates the additional environmental information before recommending an option.
Its conceptual workflow is:
Destination → Candidate routes → Pedestrian-safety filtering → Environmental analysis → Thermal exposure estimation → Route comparison → Actionable recommendation
This transforms environmental data into a decision that people can actually use.
A route is more than a line on a map
HeatRoute evaluates a journey as a collection of segments rather than treating the entire route as environmentally uniform.
Each segment can have different characteristics:
- Estimated temperature and humidity conditions
- Solar exposure and time-dependent shade
- Vegetation and land-cover characteristics
- Broad surface classifications
- Wind conditions, where suitable data is available
- Estimated time spent traversing the segment
These factors contribute to a segment-level exposure estimate. The system then combines the segment estimates to compare complete routes.
A short but highly exposed segment should not automatically be treated as equivalent to spending several minutes in an exposed environment.
This segment-based approach makes the analysis more relevant to the actual journey.
4. The Science of Being Honest About Heat
A climate-related application must do more than produce attractive maps. It must communicate what its data can—and cannot—establish.
HeatRoute does not claim to know the exact temperature of every street. Regional weather observations and forecasts cannot automatically provide precise measurements for every pedestrian path. Similarly, building footprints and vegetation data cannot perfectly reconstruct every tree canopy or shadow.
Instead, HeatRoute focuses on relative thermal exposure estimation.
The objective is to compare candidate routes using available environmental evidence, explain the factors influencing their rankings, and communicate uncertainty.
This distinction matters.
A route with a lower estimated exposure score is not guaranteed to be cooler at every point. The result depends on data quality, model assumptions, spatial coverage, and changing environmental conditions.
The score is a decision-support estimate, not a direct street-temperature measurement or medical assessment.
How can shade be estimated?
Shade is one of the most valuable—and challenging—parts of the problem.
A street may be shaded in the morning but exposed to direct sunlight later in the day. Buildings can cast shadows, vegetation can provide partial cover, and the position of the sun changes throughout the day.
HeatRoute can use available building footprints, vegetation or land-cover information, route geometry, and solar position to estimate shade.
Where the underlying data is incomplete, the system should acknowledge that limitation rather than inventing certainty.
Why confidence matters
HeatRoute should communicate both its estimate and the strength of the evidence supporting it.
For example, a route with good environmental coverage and reliable geospatial information may receive a higher confidence designation than one whose shade characteristics are inferred from incomplete data.
This makes uncertainty part of the product rather than a weakness hidden behind a polished interface.
The principle is straightforward:
Do not pretend to measure what cannot be reliably measured. Estimate what is useful for the decision, explain the uncertainty, and allow the user to make an informed choice.
5. Safety First. Heat Optimization Second.
A cooler route is not necessarily a better route.
A path through an inaccessible area, an unsuitable road, or a dangerous crossing must never become preferable merely because its estimated thermal exposure is lower.
HeatRoute therefore follows a strict decision hierarchy:
- Pedestrian safety: Exclude unsuitable routes and segments before optimization.
- Thermal exposure: Evaluate the remaining safe alternatives.
- Travel time: Enforce practical detour limits and present the trade-offs.
This hierarchy is fundamental to the design.
The system can enforce a configurable maximum detour—for example, restricting alternatives to routes no more than 20% longer than the fastest safe option.
That threshold is a product-design parameter, not a universal safety standard. It should be tested against realistic journeys.
HeatRoute also gives users control over the outcome through three simple preferences:
Fastest — Prioritize travel time while respecting safety constraints.
Balanced — Trade a reasonable amount of additional time for lower estimated exposure.
Coolest — Prefer the lowest-exposure route within the permitted detour and safety constraints.
Instead of forcing everyone to accept the same optimization, HeatRoute makes the trade-off visible.
A route comparison might communicate:
- Fastest: 11 minutes, high estimated exposure
- Balanced: 13 minutes, medium estimated exposure
- Coolest: 15 minutes, lower estimated exposure
These are illustrative values, not measured results.
The user can then decide whether the additional time is worthwhile.
6. Beyond Navigation: Water, Rest, and Recovery
The Heat & Water challenge invites us to consider the relationship between extreme heat and access to essential resources.
For someone walking outdoors in severe heat, a route alone may not be enough. Access to drinking water, a suitable resting place, or a verified cooling facility can make a journey more practical.
HeatRoute therefore has a natural complementary capability: recovery-point discovery.
Depending on available and verified location data, the system can display:
- Drinking-water stations
- Rest areas
- Shaded public spaces
- Cooling facilities
- Relevant public buildings
- Nearby hospitals or pharmacies when appropriate
These locations should not be treated as interchangeable. A hospital is not automatically a public cooling centre, and a mapped water point is not necessarily operational or accessible at all times.
The application should communicate what is known about each location and avoid presenting unverified facilities as guaranteed resources.
The resulting experience extends beyond choosing a line on a map.
It helps users understand where they may be able to access useful support along their journey.
7. Time-Aware Navigation: The Same Journey, a Different Decision
One of HeatRoute's most compelling capabilities is the ability to account for departure time.
The environmental conditions along a route can change considerably throughout the day. A shaded street in the morning may receive direct sunlight in the afternoon. Temperatures, humidity, and wind conditions can also change.
HeatRoute can therefore evaluate candidate routes for a requested departure time, using available current or forecast environmental data and time-dependent shade estimates.
Imagine planning a journey at 1:00 PM.
The system identifies that the available alternatives have high estimated exposure. A later departure may offer more favorable conditions, depending on the location and forecast.
HeatRoute can communicate this information and compare the available choices.
The purpose is not to prescribe a universally safe departure time. It is to provide additional evidence for a practical decision.
This creates an important shift in the navigation question:
Instead of optimizing only where to travel, HeatRoute can help users consider when to travel as well.
8. Built on AWS: Turning Environmental Data into Decisions
HeatRoute is intended to be a working decision-support system, not merely a conceptual interface.
AWS provides the backend foundation for processing environmental information, calculating exposure estimates, managing relevant data, and serving route recommendations.
A practical architecture for the initial version includes:
Frontend: A web application with an interactive map, destination selection, route alternatives, and exposure comparisons.
Amazon API Gateway: Provides the API interface between the application and its backend.
AWS Lambda: Executes backend logic, including thermal exposure calculations and route scoring.
Amazon S3: Stores static assets, selected geospatial datasets, configuration files, and cached or fallback demonstration data.
Amazon DynamoDB: Can store optional sensor observations, environmental observations, or other structured records where persistence is needed.
Amazon CloudWatch: Supports monitoring, logging, and troubleshooting.
The exact implementation should use only the services required by the working product.
Weather and routing data can come from suitable external APIs or open datasets, subject to their availability, licensing, rate limits, and usage conditions. Geospatial sources such as OpenStreetMap can provide useful route and location information.
The thermal calculations should remain deterministic and explainable. If AI is introduced, it can help explain a recommendation in natural language, but it should not invent environmental measurements or fabricate the underlying exposure score.
Reliability is also essential. Cached information and a controlled demonstration dataset can help the application remain usable when an external API fails.
The objective is a genuine AWS-backed application in which cloud services perform real work.
9. Making the System Practical in the Real World
HeatRoute's ambition must be matched by an honest implementation strategy.
A city-wide, real-time environmental model with perfect tree-canopy information is not a realistic starting point for a three-day hackathon.
The initial version should concentrate on a defined demonstration region, a working pedestrian-routing experience, available environmental data, a transparent exposure model, and a small set of useful recovery points.
The system can use broad surface categories and vegetation proxies instead of attempting to reconstruct every road material or tree canopy.
It should also cache relevant data and provide a reliable fallback demonstration mode.
Physical sensors are an optional enhancement. A portable temperature-and-humidity sensor, such as an ESP32 paired with a BME280, could support a small local observation exercise if the hardware is available.
Such measurements can help compare local conditions with the environmental baseline. They cannot, by themselves, establish exact thermal exposure across an entire city.
For the initial product, the essential achievement is more focused:
Generate credible route comparisons, explain the estimated exposure differences, preserve pedestrian safety, and make the decision understandable.
A transparent model that works is more valuable than a sophisticated model whose outputs cannot be defended.
10. From Individual Journeys to Community Heat Resilience
HeatRoute's longer-term potential extends beyond individual navigation.
Repeated observations and aggregated exposure estimates could help identify pedestrian corridors that consistently appear to have high estimated exposure under particular conditions.
This could provide useful information to campuses, institutions, delivery companies, and eventually urban planners.
For example, a campus might discover that a frequently used pedestrian corridor has limited shade during the afternoon. The institution could investigate whether additional shade structures, tree planting, water stations, or route improvements would help.
A municipality might use similar evidence to prioritize further assessment of exposed pedestrian corridors.
This must be done carefully: repeated model estimates are not equivalent to direct measurements of human heat stress. Infrastructure recommendations should be treated as decision-support insights that can guide further investigation, not as unquestionable conclusions.
The broader feedback loop is:
Environmental data → Heat-aware journeys → Aggregated exposure insights → Hotspot identification → Targeted interventions → Improved future conditions
This connects individual convenience with collective resilience.
HeatRoute can begin by helping one person choose a route while developing a pathway toward helping institutions understand where environmental interventions may be most valuable.
11. How We Will Measure Progress
A credible project needs more than a visually appealing map or a large numerical score.
HeatRoute should demonstrate measurable functionality.
Relevant evaluation measures include:
- Whether the application can generate and compare viable pedestrian routes
- Whether unsuitable routes are excluded before thermal optimization
- Whether exposure estimates respond logically to changes in environmental inputs
- Whether departure-time changes can affect route rankings when the conditions warrant it
- Whether the application explains the factors influencing its recommendation
- Whether confidence reflects the quality and coverage of the available data
- Whether route detours remain within configured limits
- Whether relevant water or recovery locations are available along a selected route
- Whether the AWS-backed application works reliably, including under simulated external API failures
Where the team has suitable observations, it can compare model behavior against a small number of field measurements.
The team should report only results it actually tests. It should not claim a particular percentage reduction in heat exposure, improved health outcomes, or city-wide accuracy without evidence supporting those claims.
That discipline strengthens the project's credibility.
12. Why HeatRoute Matters
The value of HeatRoute lies in its focus on an overlooked everyday decision.
People already choose routes based on traffic, distance, cost, accessibility, and convenience. As extreme heat becomes an increasingly important consideration, thermal exposure is another factor that deserves attention.
HeatRoute does not need to solve every climate problem to make a meaningful contribution.
It needs to answer one practical question well:
When I have to go outside in extreme heat, how can I reach my destination using a safe, practical route with lower estimated thermal exposure?
That is a concrete problem. It has identifiable users, a technically interesting solution, a defensible role for environmental data, and a natural pathway toward broader heat-resilience applications.
The challenge is to build it responsibly: avoid false precision, preserve safety constraints, communicate uncertainty, and ensure that every feature contributes to the decision the product exists to support.
Conclusion: Navigation for a Hotter World
HeatRoute begins with a simple observation: the shortest route and the fastest route do not necessarily offer the same environmental experience.
By combining pedestrian routing, environmental information, relative thermal exposure estimation, time-aware analysis, and access to relevant recovery points, HeatRoute aims to make that hidden difference visible.
Its ambition is not to replace existing navigation platforms or claim scientific certainty that the available data cannot support.
Its ambition is to introduce a meaningful new consideration into everyday mobility.
And its long-term opportunity is larger than a single journey: the same approach could help communities identify recurring exposure patterns and make more informed decisions about shade, water access, and cooling infrastructure.
Because in a hotter world, knowing how to get somewhere may no longer be enough. We also need to understand the conditions we experience getting there.
HeatRoute — Make every journey more heat-aware.
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