Inspiration
The COVID-19 pandemic is expanding quickly by bringing a complex spectrum of issues that has a major impact on people’s personal lives, medical system, economical system among others. The current model is showing us that the virus propagates from a territory to another rapidly, without being geographically limited, and based on the current metrics, in a few months, it could achieve exponential values. As earth citizens, we can bring our forces together and fight back by using our best skills. From a software engineer perspective, I see a great potential on tracking and manage the virus spreading by combining the Bluetooth Low Energy and the Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing protocol which will be released in Mid-May from Apple & Google partnership.
What it does
The app will use the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) feature to track proximity contacts (< 2 meters) between the users. Once an individual is tested positive with the virus, the testing laboratory will report the result to the Blue Shield application, which will add the RED status for the person in question. At the same time, all other individuals or clusters that have been in contact with the infected person will be notified and the YELLOW status will replace the default GREEN one. Users with the YELLOW status can use the build-in Symptom Tracker tool to check their symptoms for the next 14 days.
How I built it
This is a hybrid app that uses Ionic Capacitor for creating native SDKs on multiple platforms. The app frond-end is built using ReactJS and TypeScript. For database and realtime communication, we have used Google Firebase
Challenges I ran into
The Bluetooth Low Energy protocol is widely supported by both IOS and Android devices and there are different excellent libraries to implement it efficiently. After the first alpha release, I ran tests on both Android and IOS devices, with promising results at first sight. The Android devices worked flawlessly, by sending the BLE events on both foreground and background mode. IOS showed excellent behavior on the foreground but the background mode was a downside as no BLE events were sent from there. I tried multiple approaches with no success. Meanwhile, Apple & Google announced the partnership and introduction of the Privacy Tracing Protocol, which covers the functionality for the background mode.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Being able to combine the Contact Tracing feature, with the Symptom Tracker and Official News section into a friendly solution it could be a step forward on make this kind of products more popular and easy to adopt for the communities around the globe, and by adding the AI/Machine Learning toolset on top of it, researchers could use the solution to find crucial information about the virus behavior.
What I learned
As a resolution resulted from the research and development process of the solution, I think that technologies have the power to facilitate a better knowledge of one's disease and good use of health services, greater adherence to treatment and participation in health decisions, improvement in perceived support and social backing, sharing, support and reciprocity.
What's next for Blue Shield
If the project runs successfully, we will provide the complete solution and support needed to the countries' governments that require it. This will include a management console and the app itself, both self-hosted and managed by each country.
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