CovHelper

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Inspiration

All over the world, the spread of the pandemic is a persisting problem. As we saw people of all ages are affected by the problem specially older people, and people with pre-existing medical conditions (such as asthma, diabetes, heart disease). In addition, governments have to deter the spread of fake news that is making it harder to flatten the curve. That's why the best solution until now is tracking the virus, keeping the citizens aware by updating them about the current situation and finally improving their behaviour to respect social distancing.

What it does

CovHelper is a mobile application (implemented on both Android & iOs) with 2 versions one for citizens and the other for medical establishments.

The application will help the government to improve citizen’s behaviour, keep the user updated and safe by tracking of the user status ( by adding daily symptoms: his symptoms will be available only for hospitals so we can contact to have a test if needed ) and his contacts (who is infected and who was in contact with the victim) and last but not least allows the user to consult a list of nearest hospitals and donate to organisations and funds raised to defend COVID-19 outbreak.

For the version designed for medical establishments a medical assistant will be given an account to sign in and update positive tested cases. For citizens they have the ability to register and sign in.

When registering, the patient answers a collection of questions (the list can be modified dynamically). The answers of each patient will be saved in the database and an algorithm will automatically order the list of patients from most critical or urgent to least critical. This algorithm will be defined with a CORONA specialist.

The responses will also allow us to have a list of the people the patient has contacted and their family members. The questions differ depending on the case, whether you come from abroad or not.

Once connected, you can consult the Dashboard, where you can check:

• Your status and Old Symptoms ( these symptoms will be available only for hospitals so we can contact to have a test if needed )

• Add new symptoms

• Volunteering (helping around)

• Make a donation

• Quarantine counter

• News: Just display news related to Coronavirus (title contain Corona)

=> depending on your localisation country and the language you have chosen these news will be dynamically updated The api we have used to get news is https://newsapi.org/ because it provides verified news

• Trackpad: The user ca check his status if he’s infected by the virus or not who infected who and who encountered an infected

How we built it

The application will be ready to launch within two weeks so that we can catch up and track the virus all over the world.

The application is available with English, French and I'll soon add Arabic to ensure everyone can connect within the app. CovHelper is developed with react native to make sure we get the application as soon as possible on both android and iOs devices. We used material design for modern UI framework.

Apis will be developed using Firebase, we thought this will be the fastest way to do it.

We used different APIs to get data such as NewsAPI and Postman apis.

Updating a patient status is only entered by the medical establishments, this will approve the authenticity of the app and prevent false positives or self-reporting, which might lead to falsification of records.

Challenges we ran into

• Add Location

• Check coronavirus victims’ position :

For iOs it is possible to get a notification when the location did change, this will be enough for us. When location did change, we will start a call to the API telling the server that our position did change. For android, if we keep a notification of our application no dismiss-able, we can keep asking for location. This does fix the problem too. One last problem for iOs, if our device restart, the user need to restart the application to make sure we are requesting location again. We don’t have this problem for android because we can use on Reboot broadcast receiver to make sure we restart our service every time we restart the device.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are mostly proud to contribute in the developing a solution that will reduce the spread of the virus throughout the country while finding a vaccine to cure the pandemic with the tracking method. It will improve awareness and help medical stuff at the frontline in order to keep everyone healthy.

We specially appreciate the wide range of offered resources, the freedom in making your work plan and the overall friendly atmosphere.

We are able today to apprehend projects with a good perspective and to propose adequate solutions to the issues addressed and we are really thankful of that.

This project was on top 3 finalists in HackTheVirus Hackathon organized by GoMyCode in Tunisia.

This Hackathon allowed us to get in touch with great minds that's why we decided that everyone still can contribute to this project: designers, developers, idea holders… we will provide open source code for developers just to make sure we all are making a difference.

What we learned

We should mention we were able to encounter great minds from all over the world that really care about this crisis. We had the chance to exchange ideas, motivate each other ,learn from one another and make great friends through slack workspace.

Briefly, This experience helped me sharpen the spirit of initiative and even more boost my taste for challenge and leadership.

What's next for CovHelper

We plan to get the app deployed as soon as possible for that we'll need :

• Ensuring a sustainable cost of running such an app in the cloud storage

• Government entity or public health organisation commission to track data.

• Medical system contribution to update the status of patients.

We also plan to add these features :

• Location :

• Consult list of nearest Hospitals : Localise hospitals nearby so that the user can contact them in case of urgency

• Notification : we send a notification to the user:

o When he enters a new building

o When the distance between the user and a Corona case is < to 100 meters

This application will guide us through this period and even after quarantine just to ensure everyone of us gets back to his normal lifestyle and why not have a better lifestyle.

The app will remain a great tool to donate, volunteer to hospitals and charity organisations and we will allow people in need to post their problems. It will be a platform to give and get Help.