Active COVID-19 Clinical Trials Tracker

Running on Android

Inspiration

We were inspired to make this mobile app as we wanted to do a project related to the treatment of the COVID-19 virus. After reading articles about unreliable information for COVID-19 online, we wanted to create an app that only uses information from an official source, the World Health Organization, so that people can know what types of accurate clinical trials are being done in the world and not get misled.

What it does

This mobile app tracks any active clinical trials dedicated to developing a vaccine or cure for the COVID-19 virus. The user can scroll across a world map generated from the Google Maps API, where markers are located to indicate what clinical trials are being done in each part of the world. All of this information was obtained off of the official WHO organization website through an updated spreadsheet. If the user taps on one of the markers, it displays a popup containing the title of the clinical trial and a link to their website containing more information. If the user taps on the popup, it will instantly take them to the respective website. The user also has options to zoom in and out of the map.

How we built it

We utilized the Flutter framework and Google Maps API to create this app. We got the information for the clinical trials off a spreadsheet on International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) section of the WHO organization website (https://www.who.int/ictrp/data/en/), and we converted it to a JSON format. We then had some functions to read off this JSON file and make "Trial" classes for each entry, where we could then use the information to plot markers on the Google Maps.

Challenges we ran into

This was the first time we worked with Flutter in a remote team environment developing a mobile application. It was difficult at first to find a way to collaborate with each other and it took a long time to set up. At the end, we utilized Visual Studio Code's live share for real time collaboration,Git and GitHub for version control, and we communicated using Facebook messenger.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the fact that we managed to develop a helpful mobile application using Flutter. We just started learning about Flutter the week before this hackathon through videos on Linkedin Learning and Youtube, and we wanted to get our hands dirty right away making an app to practice our skills. We are also happy that we made a useful app that can provide reliable accurate data about the clinical trials being performed for the treatment of COVID-19 as we noticed there was no mobile application currently being made for that purpose, and we hope this application can be of help to people.

What we learned

We learned how to work in a remote team environment, how to make an iOS/Android/Web application with Flutter, and how to utilize the Google Maps API on Google Cloud.

What's next for Active COVID-19 Clinical Trials Tracker

We were planning on adding more features after this hackathon. We were developing a Web version of the application using Flutter as well, but unfortunately we were not able to finish due to incompatibilities between the Google Maps plugin for mobile and web, so we want to finish this Web version sometime. One of the features we also wanted to add was a histogram that shows the distribution of clinical trials per country.

Built With

Submitted to

HackDSC

Created by

Using Flutter, I worked on the layout of the home page with the instructions and implemented the Google Maps API to display the map with the clinical trials on the main page. I read and processed information from the JSON file to place markers on the map and I also combined all the pages to make everything work smoothly on the Android version of the app. I also worked on the web version of the app, however it was eventually scrapped due to incompatibility with the Google Maps plugin for Flutter.

Private user
I worked on splash screen and the Trial class to store the information from the ICTRP json file. Also I did worked on popup menu, but unfortunately it wasn't used.

Van Minh Ngai
I worked on flutter for the first time. This is my first app that I am developing using Flutter and google services. I worked on the iOS part of the app, helped in setting up API for google maps and geocoding, and helped with UI and the data extracting part. I retrieved the ICTRP data from the WHO website and converted to JSON. All our group members used Visual Studio Live Share and we contributed to the best of our ability to complete the app.

Keerthana Madhavan
Honors Computer Science Student at University of Windsor

Updates

Private user started this project — Apr 26, 2020 12:32 PM EDT

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