CovidTrace

A mobile app and a web dashboard that helps the government authorities in developing countries to keep a track on the Covid-19 quarantined people

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Inspiration

Government agencies are facing a hard time dealing with contact tracing and keeping the containment as low as possible especially in the developing countries where the medical facilities are not on a large scale.

So in order to keep people at home and track their health, there should be an easily accessible and secure platform for governments to be able to keep track on the quarantined people.COVID Trace app is a powerful way to warn people about exposure to COVID-19. COVID Trace is a scalable, automated contact tracing app that respects privacy. Our goal was to find a solution that preserved privacy but balanced that with the public health need for information to combat the disease. We started with:

Don’t ask for data you don’t need. Do as much on the phone as possible. Hold onto data for as little time as possible. To help stick to those guidelines, we decided not to use any 3rd party tracking or authentication unless needed. By extension, COVID Trace will not include advertising.

So what information does COVID Trace transmit?

If exposed, it will transmit the day and the city/town where it took place. When you self report, your location history for the past 3 weeks is anonymized and shared. When you self report, your answers to the symptom questionnaire are also transmitted and stored but are not associated with your location data. What does that mean if I have the app and I happen not to be sick? COVID Trace will record and store only the last 3 weeks’ location history. Until you self-report, the data remains only on your phone. If the app alerts you to exposure, we will record the day and the city/town where the exposure occurred.

All of your data is kept on your phone unless you choose to share it to alert others. The data that is shared publicly is anonymized and devoid of unique identifiers.

It’s important to realize that perfect privacy and the information needed for digital contact tracing are in conflict with one another. Despite the tradeoffs, we’ve been thinking about preserving user privacy while offering an effective way to contact trace.

What it does

On first use, the app steps you through the process of sharing your location and enabling notifications about exposures. After onboarding, the home screen has your current exposure status and helpful links to prepare and cope with COVID-19. From then on, the app will monitor your location and periodically check the time and place of possible exposures against your location data.

The most crucial feature of COVID Trace is alerting you about possible exposure. When you get an alert, it means that you and a person with COVID-19 were roughly in the same area in the hour identified. It could mean that you had a 15-minute conversation 3 feet apart with the symptomatic person. It could also mean that you were in the same place 45 minutes apart. You will have to judge your risk based on what you were doing at that moment in time.

How I built it

The app is built using Google's cross-platform UI software development kit called Flutter along with the Google Maps API for the Map, the data is currently stored locally unless it's sent to a central secure server. Most of the UI/UX features are kind of defaults and we need someone with good UI/UX experience for helping us out. The contact tracing is done using Bluetooth and geolocation working in conjunction where the beacon ID's are exchanged and hence detected if someone has come in contact with a possible patient.

The tracking also takes the help of machine learning which analyses the cell phone sensors to see if there has been movement and also if the person have moved outside of the geofencing around the house location.

The Yoga feature utilizes Google's Tensorflow object detection API in order to recognize the poses of Yoga, although there is much learning to be done for the yoga poses to be trained.

Challenges I ran into

As Flutter is a pretty new platform finding all the resources needed is quite challenging, we need someone with good backend dev skills to back us for further feature development. We are still using a geofencing API from a 3rd party provider for the Flutter implementation and the full license is quite expensive.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We have put up the prototype app and its running.

What I learned

What's next for CovidTrace

We are trying to implement different features like AI, based yoga instructor which uses PoseNet an Object detection API for detecting yoga poses, Why yoga? Yoga can keep you fit and calm during this pandemic and the good part is that your cell phone can be your instructor. We are also putting up another feature where the stay at home will be converted into the gameplay and you can earn rewards for staying at home which can later be used to shop online.

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