Pangaea DDE

Inspiration

Our inspiration is very close to home, as our group members have family members who struggle with chronic illnesses. As a result, we wanted to create a way to spread awareness for the most prevalent chronic illnesses worldwide. We started with dementia, since it's very personal to one of our members who lost a loved one with dementia.

What it does

Pangaea DDE is a 3D visualizer for global disease data. It takes disease data and displays it as a heatmap projected onto the globe. Users can interact with the globe by clicking on countries, and are given a pop-up with information on the population, income group, subregion, and dementia prevalence (as a rate per 100,000). Additionally, they are presented with AI Insight, courtesy of the Gemini API, which provides analysis on dementia in the country, as well as sources to learn more about dementia.

How we built it

We used the following tools to build our project:
Cesium, an open-source JavaScript library for 3D Geospatial Applications as our visualization method.
React to use Cesium.
Python to merge our data.
Gemini API to present insights and analysis of dementia data per country.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we wanted to use Google Earth as our visualization method, but its API has been deprecated since 2015.
Our group had some issues with GitHub Source Control, since two branches diverged too much when refactoring code.
The names of countries didn't match between the geojson and the GBD data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We accomplished what we set out to do!!!
While the code isn't super polished, everything that we envisioned at the start of Bitcamp is functional. In particular, getting the heat map to work and overriding the default Cesium infobox with our custom information popup was a huge milestone

What we learned

We learned how to use the Gemini API, and a lot more about React.
We read the Cesium docs to learn how to use the library.

What's next for Pangaea DDE

We want to increase awareness of diseases across the globe, and aggregating data so that users can view and compare the prevalence of something like Parkinson's vs dementia globally would further that goal.
We also want to make the transition between years smoother so users can see changes in the heat map as they move through the slider, as well as make it possible to directly compare data between years.