Covi-Rakshak

Support and resources is what one needs when suffering from Covid. Covi-Rakshak bridges the abundance of Information available online posted by hundreds of people and brings it in the hands of people.

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Inspiration and What it does

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic loss of human life worldwide and presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, food systems and the world of work. The economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic is devastating. This is the time to extend voluntary help to people in need and technology can play an important role in amplifying needs and supply resources.

In these pressing times of the ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic, one suffering from this deadly disease needs help, support, information and most importantly resources.

India is now going through a major shortage in Covid-related resources be it, Medicines (Favipiravir, Remdesivir, Tocilizumab etc.) or Oxygen or Hospital beds and ventilators. It is already hard for a person in need to avail these resources due to the shortage, it becomes even hard when they are unaware of when these resources have been vacated by others/or are resupplied.

There are thousands of posts/tweets and articles on the Internet which provide contact information and availability to avail different resources.

To reduce the overwhelm caused by these enormous number of posts and tweets. We created "Covi-Rakshak" One place to have all contact information for Covid-related help and resources.

Covi-Rakshak app works by having a database of contact information of all Covid-related resources throughout the country posted by people across the internet. It filters those contact information based on either Location or the specific resource needed (whether it be medicines or oxygen or plasma etc) or both based on what the app user needs and shows all the contact information at one place.

So now, whenever a person is in need of any resource she/he can search the app by putting in her/his Location and the specific resource she/he needs. And the app will search the database and filter the results accordingly.

The app also enables people to submit leads on resources which are then verified by our team before showing it on the app.

How we built it

Ease of use and simplicity were the key during the design stage of the app Many hours of meticulous work was done to make the UI simplified, light and pretty. Android Studio was used for it's development Kotlin Language is best suited for native android development, Hence Kotlin was used as the primary language for the app's development

Challenges we ran into

Incorporating RecyclerView into the app was a tough point during the app's development. Kotlin is a language which is regularly updated which makes tutorials outdated For many years, Java has been the go to language for Android development hence, materials for android studio was difficult to find and to refer to. Incorporating APIs proved difficult, we are working tirelessly to figure out how to make APIs work with the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to integrate Firebase into the app. While many Covid related apps are unnecessarily complex, we are proud that we were able to find a simplified way to showcase information. The most important thing that we are proud of is that we got a chance through this hackathon to selflessly work for humanity in the grave pandemic situation, and came up with such an app which will actually be practical and helpful for people all around us. We were able to ponder over what the society presently needed the most and developed this app.

What's next for Covi-Rakshak

Covi-Rakshak app is very much in development phase right now. But the development is in a rush. We have approached Twitter to get their API permit. We will be incorporating Twitter API which will help get tweets related to Covid resources directly into the app, and a News API which will help us add News feature into the app.

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