Knowit used AWS to renew an app that helps Keep Sweden Tidy

For decades, they have organized litter picking campaigns and offered education for children. Additionally, they have developed new methods for measuring litter in various environments. One of these methods is crowdsourcing to which a mobile app was developed. The app allows citizens to report vandalism and different types of litter to municipalities. Municipalities can access, manage and analyse these reports through a web-based dashboard.

The main goal of this project was to renew the already existing non-functioning mobile and web applications using AWS and other modern technologies. A secondary goal for the project was to explore the feasibility of using computer vision for automated trash recognition.

Native iOS and Android applications have been developed with a fresh modern design while keeping important existing functionalities. A new chat feature was added to facilitate communication between the citizen and municipality and allow easier localization of reported litter.

Knowit’s Innovation Zone (IZ) division was in charge of development, project delivery and constant feature ideas through agile. Håll Sverige Rent had participated in a Hackaton organized by AWS in November 2019, where their winning idea was to utilize machine vision for automatic waste identification. For this project, Knowit’s IZ team examined whether it would make sense to include machine vision functionality in the new application.

– Sadly the short answer to this was no. The machine vision models implemented for waste identification (Mask R-CNN and DetectoRS) were too imprecise and would have greatly degraded the user experience, Knowit’s IZ leader Nathan Nylund explains.

The team carefully analysed the new technologies and decided against replacing the existing machine learning feature with machine vision. A smooth user experience was seen as paramount. Although machine vision was not implemented, learnings from the analysis were collected for the next iteration.

Stefan Hållberg and Hanna Nyström from Håll Sverige Rent were very happy with the collaboration. The app will help them, and the municipalities of Sweden, target existing problems and work together with the public in their fight for a litter-free country.

The team at Cybercom (Knowit) has been very helpful and professional during the course of this project. After going through the user needs and our ideas for the new app, they turned it into something that was not only functional but also easy to use. They are really good at seeing things from the user's perspective and with great attention to details,

Hanna Nyström says.

The client also praised Knowit for the great insight into making the app more interactive, enabling the users to get feedback on their sent reports and municipalities to request more information.