Coronavirus Crowd Monitoring Software

Inspiration

Coronavirus disease(COVID-19), a highly infectious disease that causes respiratory illness, is spreading rapidly across the world. As of March 29th, the virus has infected 700,000 people and killed 33,000 people. The rapid spread of this novel virus could be explained by the fact that many people who are infected are unaware of it. Therefore, scientists claimed that social-distancing is the key to combating the virus. Researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology suggest 90% of the infections are prevented after social distancing intervention. To slow down the spread of this novel virus, the New York City government has imposed lockdown and banned all large gatherings and non-essential businesses. Grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals, and testing areas still remain open. Those essential businesses are often filled up large numbers of customers and can potentially become hot spots to spread the virus.

What it does

Coronavirus Crowd Monitoring Software(CCMS) is a mobile application that provides citizens with real-time status on crowdedness in grocery stores, pharmacies and other essential businesses. CCMS leverages Google’s Popular Times API(85% accuracy) and utilizes data from customer’s feedbacks to construct a reliable and accurate map to estimate crowd density in each location. The application also provides in-depth information by displaying photos of the crowd in the store which are shared by the customers.
CCMS can also be used by law enforcement to monitor and disperse large crowds. There have been multiple reports of people disobeying social distancing and gathering the parks. CCMS provides a feature that allows customers to report those incidents similar to police alerts feature in the Waze app.

Design Consideration

The most important design consideration is user participation. CCMS can only display images and pictures insofar as enough customers participate and share their pictures in the stores. We need to provide incentives for users to participate. An option would be to partner with government agencies to start a behavioral outreach campaign(Example: “See something, say something”). Another option would be to provide points in return for discounts.

What's next for Coronavirus Crowd Monitoring Software

If we have more time and resources, we would crowdsource social media data to improve our estimation for crowd density. For example, we can use the Twitter Streaming API to gather data and analyze tweets related to crowd gathering by using natural language processing techniques such as text mining.