Covent

Inspiration

It has been our pleasure that through the platform of DevPost we are able to provide our contribution to fighting against the coronavirus(COVID19) pandemic. We have observed that the major issue behind the spread of the COVID19 is through community transfer, which can be of any form like a wedding, funeral or meeting. All around the world, the problem has been the same, and it has been getting worse each day. So, we felt there is a need to analyze this issue through the monitoring of such public events and their record maintenance. Not only this but using this platform it also becomes easy for government and health care authorities to identify affected people easily and treat them beforehand of any more spread. For this issue, we developed the "Covent" Android app to tackle the pandemic issue and to stop the spread.

What it does

This app is a real-time social platform that joins people together based on the events(social gatherings) they attended. A user needs to signup/log in through email(with verification over mail). Any event organizer can create a closed group of attendees in the event and people can view their respective attended events on the app. This group must contain at least a minimum of 5 people for the organizer to create an event. And the event is automatically removed after 14-15 days as it usually takes around 14 days to show the symptoms of coronavirus. Any user who confirms COVID19 +ve can trigger an alarm present in the app. All the people sharing the same group with that person will be alarmed and further people with 2nd-degree contact will also be alarmed.

How I built it

The application is built entirely in Android Studio supported by JAVA and front-hand UI is expressed in XML. The app has been integrated with the real-time database and user authentication through GCP Firebase API. App has been built with necessary toast messages, dialog boxes, spinners and error handlers wherever necessary.

Challenges I ran into

The major challenge was how to send the stream of alert message till 2nd-degree connections. Also, another challenge was to integrate the exact location of the event(latitude and longitude), which would be helpful in determining the potentially dangerous clusters.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The application could assign color coding to the different events of the groups so that the person in the group could be cautious and avoid an event with a ‘red’ code in the near future. This would help contain the spread of the coronavirus.

What I learned

It was a challenging experience for us to build this application. We learned how the android application could be integrated into a database using ‘Firebase’. Also, we learned how the crowd due to any event could increase the spread of the virus and how it is recommended for us and everyone to avoid such overwhelming events with a crowd of 5 or more people. It was great to understand the capabilities of firebase, in order to perform all messaging functionalities in the application.

What's next for Covent:

For the future scopes of the application, we are planning to push out notifications. These notifications will be pushed out by the person who is feeling symptomatic of the coronavirus flu. This will alert every member of each of the groups that the person is part of. As a consequence of this, every member can practice self-quarantine at home for some days. Then, we will also integrate the location of the event in the application. This will help us determine the potential clusters and the notorious events in a particular locality so that people can avoid such events in the future.

Team: