Covidar

Inspiration

When the lockdown started in my country, Argentina, I received a lot of calls from familiars around the country asking me how I was doing. Fortunately, I’m not a covid patient neither a had the chance to interact with people who might have it. Nevertheless I though it would be a good idea to build an application to help, for the next reasons:

-For people that is not completely sure if they have the virus or not, they can track the symptoms and the variation. I think this is very useful, in particular when visiting a doctor and sharing this information. Sometimes people forget about how they felt a couple of days, and having this data saved, can make the task way easier.

-Doctors can add pacients as “friends” inside the app, so they can access their symptom lists and see the evolution, without having to call them or make an appointed. I thought this is very helpful since there are going to be people still infected sent to home when the availability of beds at hospital decreases.

-Regular users can also add other people as friends. This will help with families, staying connected and avoiding unwanted calls. Let’s say I’m infected, my family can see my status on the app without having to call me every single day to ask me about my progress.

-We are in the middle of a lockdown, so besides the symptoms list, I thought it would be nice to have what I called as “help requests”. Although we should stay home, we need to go out to buy groceries, for example, but there are people who might be scared to do it or just can not (there are people who have other diseases and being exposed to the virus might increase way more the chances of death). So, using the application, they might request for help.

How I built it

I had to code just for a week, or less

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

So far, I have finished a first approach of the application and I sent it to the play store for review. I hope it to get live soon.

What I learned

It's not the first app that I publish on the market, but the process has changed a lot since the last time I had to do it.

What's next for Covidar

I have more ideas to be added in the app. One of them has to do with the permissions of getting out of our houses. We are in the middle of a lock down and we should not leave home except if we are going to buy groceries or for work. There are cities in which there are some controls by the police, and that's a bottle neck that causes people to get late to their job. So, the app can help with that, with a system to request permissions, and another feature to quickly check if the permit is valid or not.