covidshopper Web

Help people find what they are looking for and give them alerts on where to find it. Using maps utility you can see where items that are essential are within a certain area.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this project comes from the need to support the community during this crisis and manage the potential shopping panic, where consumers can easily find goods they need. If the situation gets worse, it would be nice for people to find what they are looking for by easily using this app.

What it does

The app informs and alerts people when a certain item becomes available, it predicts when the item will be ready in good quantity, allowing people to obtain it promptly. It should eventually reduce the amount of time people have to spend moving around and therefore limit the scope for cross-infection.

Page 1 - Find

Benefits

  • Safer travel by reducing the journey time
    • Reduce the chances of cross infection by traveling less
    • Easily find out if the place we wanthat have the goods you require - Screen 2 - Add a search item - toilet roll
    • Helps you know when is a good time to go out and avoid queues and crowded places especially supermarkets

Features

  • Personalised location - mapping vulnerable people and their needs. See where you can purchase nearest to you Screen 2 - Add a search item - toilet roll
  • Easily shows the distance to all locations that have your goods provided by other people in the world community.
  • Estimates how likely it is to get your item
  • Checks on what is needed and re-calculates the top items missing
  • Search capability for users to search for the items and then see nearest to their location and the quantity of goods.

Page 2 - Alert

Benefits & Features

  • It allows the community to add the items that are available
  • Connecting volunteers with the community to support our collective needs
  • The user can add the items missing and their quantities
  • The system gets their location getting their consent and disposes once the app is not longer in use
  • Easy interface with a lot of information on how to use it

Page 3 - Need an Item?

Benefits

  • The community can inform the app of items missing to help create a list of the most required items
  • The app allows for the public to inform the community about the items they need within their location
  • The app will utilise analytics to surface the most searched item and goods

How I built it

I used some of the best technologies to develop this tool below there is some more information: Frontend - I made use of NextJS/React, for the maps I made use of the MapBox. Some of the key challenges is to use the API for the maps to calculate the distances between the user's location and then sort them starting with the closest location.

The frontend is hosted in Zeit/Vercel on their 'now' platform.

For the backend, I developed a nodeJS app that uses Prisma ORM to get the data and provide the data to the frontend app.

Potentially this REST API could be also used by a native app, such as React Native to create a native application that serves the same purpose.

The backend is deployed in Heroku, and the service can be seen if you use this URL

https://ariskorona.herokuapp.com/api/stores?missing=toiletroll&date=2020-04-27

The website only shows the current days results and every day it refreshes.

Challenges I ran into

As the app has grown more and more challenges have come up. The time was limited so I need to quickly learn how technologies were working and apply to bring the best result.

One of the challenges was to deploy Prisma in Heroku, and understanding how Prisma is working.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud that I took the challenge to try to build something in a very small time reacting to the current situation offering and support to the community.

What you have done during the weekend

During the weekend I further enhanced functionality like connecting the backend to the frontend, getting the data to display correctly on the map, allow the users to share their locations, calculate the distance and short the distances, filter the data further moe to provide better results.

The necessities in order to continue the project

In order to continue there will be further work and funding. We believe that this app can help the community and the people that help us during these hard times as well as people from the risk groups. It is an app that could be used after the crisis and we should never forget that as a community we will get back stronger after this.

What I learned

I learn how to use the technology and also built something for other people.

What's next for covidshopper

To further improve it and make it go live.

How to test it?

Url of the video: https://youtu.be/EX3DNT5knso Url of the demo: https://anticorona2.now.sh/

To try the app visit the Alert page https://anticorona2.now.sh/addstore

  • Add a store e.g Tesco, Location e.g London Bridge,
  • Add an Item
  • Select from the drop-down for example toilet roll
  • and add a quantity

Go to the main page and search for 'toilet roll' you should be able to see the pin.

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