Findway

Findway

Indoor navigation for NHS hospitals. Search for a ward, clinic or department and follow the route from the front door, floor by floor, with step-free options, live re-routing, QR re-positioning and an AR view.

• Web / PWA: Next.js 16 App Router, Leaflet (2D) and three.js (3D). Works offline for any hospital opened once while online, with an offline page for everything else.
• Android and iOS: Capacitor apps that carry the pages and floor plans inside them and call this site's /api. Built in CI; see docs/mobile.md.
• Maps: 67 mapped hospital venues built from trusts' published site maps, plus every NHS hospital from the ODS register as a located directory entry. See data/README.md for the pipeline and docs/mapping-review.md for how good they are. Outside the UK the app shows the hospitals of the country the visitor is in, from OpenStreetMap, with indoor maps where OSM has them; see docs/world-data.md.
• Links and posters: /navigate?venue=<id>&to=<waypointId> opens a hospital with a destination chosen; add &stepfree=1 to ask for the step-free route, and &floor=&lat=&lng= (what a printed poster's QR code carries) to place the reader where the poster is. The address bar keeps venue and to up to date, so any screen is shareable by copying the URL. See src/lib/share-link.ts.
• Guidance you can hear: while navigating, Spoken directions reads each step aloud; every step is also announced to screen readers and marked with a short vibration where the device supports it.
• For hospitals: hospitals pay, per site, monthly or yearly, for an Official listing (badge, branding, priority updates, visitor counts). They sign up at /for-hospitals and pay through Stripe with no one in the loop; see docs/subscriptions.md.
• Pages: / (landing), /navigate (the map), /map (mapping tools), /accessibility, /privacy.

Run it

npm cinpm run dev          # http://localhost:3000

Every environment variable is optional. With none set the app runs device-only. .env.example lists what each one turns on: Postgres for shared venues and signals, Anthropic for sign-reading in Survey Mode, Mapbox for outdoor routing, Clerk for optional accounts and the back office, Stripe for hospital subscriptions, and NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL for absolute URLs in link previews and the sitemap. The back office at /admin manages venues, coverage, searches, activity, accounts and roles: see docs/backoffice.md.

Checks

npm run lintnpm run typechecknpm run nhs:test     # pipeline, placement, routing, links and floor-naming testsnpm run maps:audit   # grades every shipped venue; --full for every findingnpm run build

CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs all of these on every pull request.

Map quality

Maps come from PDFs that trusts publish, and not every PDF titled "site map" is a map. A page judged by eye not to be one (a directory table, a travel leaflet, a duplicate) goes in data/not-maps.json with the reason, and the pipeline refuses it from then on. A venue whose plan is a stand-in rather than the real building is marked illustrative, and the app says so.

Review

REVIEW.md is the current review of the app — content, function and design — with what has been done about each finding and what is still open.

Deploy

Railway (railway.json) or Vercel (vercel.json), both running npm run build && npm run start.