The war in Iran has left millions of Israelis facing a daily dilemma – when can I take a shower?
Sirens can sound at any moment to warn of incoming missiles and nobody wants to be caught in the shower mid-shampoo needing to run to the nearest place of safety – which could well be a public bomb shelter across the road – barefoot and wrapped only in a towel.
Software developer Ben Greenberg has come up with a solution. It’s an app that calculates the chances of an incident-free shower in real time, based on missile alert data, location within Israel and other factors, such as how long you spend in the shower.
“Imagine a world where you lose control over your sense of time. You’ve lost your ability to set the contour and the shape of your day,” he said.
“You say I’m going to take my shower at this time your enemies have a different plan. And so there becomes this need to create some control back into your life, to create some order, some predictability.”
Many Israelis have a reinforced safe room in their home, where they shelter during a missile attack.
But many more, especially in in older apartment blocks, share a communal shelter in the basement. Failing that they may need to make their way to a standalone public bomb shelter provided by the municipality.
Ben came up with the idea of bestshowertime.com when he was caught short in the shower himself and has to dash to safety.
The app, available in English and Hebrew, gives a score out of 100 as to how risky it would to have a shower at any time.
It analyses real-time rocket alert data from Israel’s Home Front Command to estimate the safest times for a shower. It also has an option for those wishing to use the toilet. The safety score is based on time since the last alert, average gaps between alerts, frequency trends, and time-of-day patterns.
Users are asked to input how long they spend in the shower, how long they take to get out, and the area where they live.
The app gives a 24-hour timeline indicating frequency of alerts – there have been 230 in the first five days of the war. That’s an average of 46 every day, but the alerts are area-specific, depending on the predicted trajectory of the missile.
“I have a full -time job as a software developer, but I tend to just build apps that solve problems for me,” said Ben, who moved to Israel in 2018 from New York, where he was a rabbi. “Sometimes they end up helping other people.
“It just struck me that I wish I could have something that would tell me if it’s a good time right now to take a shower and how likely is it that I’m going to be interrupted by our Iranian regime friends.
“The missile data is available on the internet.
“It’s ready to be used. And the app is fetching that data every 30 seconds and refreshing it.”
He built the app for himself, but shared it on the internet and says he’s been surprised at the level of interest.
“I’ve received dozens and dozens of messages in the last two days from people around the country,” he said.
“And I actually put an analytics tracker on the app just to see usage, and it’s shot up to thousands of page views.”
The actual application itself is built on pretty basic technology, he said.
“The hardest part is trying to figure out a good sense of data modelling for predictive analysis, but that’s where I chose to go very simple and just look at the actual missile alert data frequency rates and the trends and the trend rates of up or down and then weigh each of those.
“So the actual missiles, the amounts of missiles coming at a given time, that is the highest weighted item there from the data model, and then the rest of them are rated less so accordingly, and then together they produce a comprehensive score.”
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