CovidWatch

Inspiration

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we work and live. CovidWatch is designed to make Canadian lives easier during these difficult times. The current COVID Alert app leaves a lot to be desired - not to mention the privacy and security issues it raises. Our mission is to provide a new, more attractive option of using our everyday technology to stop the spread.

What it does

View detailed, live statistics of confirmed cases, explore a heat map to see the most dangerous regions nearby to contract the virus, and make an appointment to get vaccinated at the nearest health clinic to you. Appointments are suggested with social distancing in mind, ensuring no two separate parties overlap and come into contact. All appointment details are then forwarded to the respective vaccine distribution sites. CovidWatch is also a cross-platform app, meaning it runs seamlessly on iOS and Android.

How I built it

CovidWatch is built entirely with Flutter, Google's cross-platform mobile application development framework. Data is sourced from Dart's COVID19 API and location features are powered by Google's Maps and Places API. Appointment data is centralized in a Google Firebase's Cloud Firestore database, allowing it to easily be accessed by any hospital-side web applications built in the future.

Challenges we faced

CovidWatch was a particularly challenging application to build. As COVID19 is still relatively new to the world (even moreso the sofware development world), it was difficult to find strong libraries and APIs to power this application. The biggest challenge was using location data to generate heat maps on a Google Maps plugin for Flutter. This was eventually accomplished by combining multiple existing packages to create one, centralized solution.