COVID.radar

Our mobile app is available on the App Store!
Get safe routes which avoid crowded areas.

Inspiration

Major software companies like Google and Yandex have developed tools for monitoring social distancing levels around the world. However, these metrics provide information only about whole cities, not districts or neighbourhoods. We decided to create a platform with better granularity, which would allow users to avoid places where crowds were spotted recently.

What it does

Our mobile app lets you view and report social distancing violations around you and plan safe routes which avoid crowded areas. Users can also view our on the platform's website link

How we built it

Our native iOS app is written in Swift and already available on the App Store. As a database choice we decided to go for MongoDB as it is fast and scalable. The website is made in Tilda with some embedded JS.

Challenges we ran into

Our team members say: Raul: finding out the right documentation for mongodb node js driver ...and reading github issue tickets for 7 hours to make it work

Egor: Google Maps API turned out to be quite naughty. Didn't expect it really.

Sofia: finding a free dataset with useful and meaningful geospatial data was nearly impossible.

Sasha: The most difficult challenge I was confronted with was integrating the heat map layer.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

In under 2 days our team managed to build a working platform, which already has its first users!

What we learned

Productive teamwork in self-isolation is harder than it seems to be, but is definitely possible. We also learned a lot of technical things in the field of geographical data collection and processing.