Concorona

Inspiration

South Africa just went into a 3 week full country lockdown. The country is in panic and misinformation is spreading like wildfire. Our startup, facing this new economic downturn, decided to find how we could use our incentivisation technology to be useful in the situation and play our part to help. After brainstorming as a team, we came up with the idea of using a chatbot to deliver critical information and offer reward points for regular interaction.

We aim to integrate these reward points into critical outlets for discounts on essentials like food and medicine. In this way that those affect by the corona virus, especially the disadvantaged, can offset some of the expenses on essential products.

The idea is, you keep yourself informed so that the effect of the virus is lessened, and you get rewarded with possible discounts from collecting reward points. Participating outlets get another way to attract customers and play a part in helping society lessen the effect of the virus.

What it does

Through the chatbot users can take quizzes about the corona virus, prevention, and myths, earning the user points for correct answers. It also allows users to complete a daily health check to track their symptoms, earning rewards for each day they complete it.

Interaction with the quizzes and health check allows us to store data that can be used to track symptoms and spread, as well as gauge where the knowledge gaps about the virus are.

How I built it

We opted for Facebook messenger for its freely accessible messenger API. Our 2 developers created the bot and integrations with our wallet for storing rewards points. Our 2 researchers sourced the necessary information from reputable sources and further verified it with health professionals.

We developed the platform with Node Js, Serverless, AWS Lambda, and Mongo DB.