Local Covid-19 Clinics

Inspiration

With talks of a COVID-19 vaccination soon becoming available to Canadian citizens, our team thought it would be appropriate to create an app to help you find your closest COVID-19 related facility for testing and vaccination purposes.

What it does

The app takes a postal code as input, searches for the closest COVID-19 clinics in the area, and displays the name, address, and phone number of the facility on the screen. The app can also open the location of the facility on Google Maps. The app also displays information on the COVID-19 situation near the facility so that the user can take appropriate measures for their journey according to the stats displayed.

How we built it

Multiple APIs were used to retrieve relevant information:

ArcGIS was used to get the locations of all the COVID-19 related facility in Canada and their provided information.
OpenCovidApi was used to get the COVID-19 situation in Canada. Android studio was used for the creation of the app.
Geocoder API was used to get the coordinates of the user input for the backend methods.

Android studio was used for the creation of the app.

Java was used for the backend of the app.

Challenges we ran into

Finding appropriate APIs as Canada has significantly fewer APIs dedicated to providing COVID-19 information compared to the US.
Minor Git-Hub version control problems due to the chaotic nature of hackathons.
Unresponsive activities from the android emulator.

What we learned

We learned:

how to properly implement and use an API on Android Studio.
how to properly interface different APIs together since API requests are fulfilled asynchronously and an Android app is synchronous by nature.
how the Android Studio User Interface works and how to properly design one.

What's next for Local Covid-19 Clinics

Improve the User Interface of the application.
Make it more user friendly and intuitive to use.
Add more features like finding out the cost and time it takes to travel to the desired clinics.
Make the local stats less generic by using stats from health code regions instead of provinces from the OpenCovidApi. Due to time restrictions, health code regions could not be interfaced properly with Geocoder API.