Akasa - Partial, selective lockdown tool

I have seen many problems in how Italy applied lockdown, this tool make it easy for both citizen and police to manage lockdowns

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Preamble

I knew of EUVsVirus from a friend only Friday 24. Excuse me for the form and the lack of the video (I posted just a placeholder to proceed with the submission), I hope you can focus just on my proposal content. Thanks. Instead of the video I will attach some screen shots that should represent what the application does. I would have been happy to create a video but the time is really tight. However, I will do it soon if someone could be interested. For the same reason I can’t publish a working URL, the app is only on my dev machine at the moment, but will become public soon.

Inspiration

I was inspired by the desire to solve the problem I saw around me in Italy during the unexpected covid emergency. As you probably know, the situation went out of control and without any tracking tool the authorities could only lockdown the country. Of course, people still have basic needs, like buying food and make a minimal activity just to keep the blood circulating, so the government issued paper authorizations that could be verified by Police. The procedure was entirely manual and many started to cheat going out often with the excuse to buy food or make sport. The government reaction was further repression by police which created lot of frustration in those who were respecting restrictions. To wrap it up it could be handled better with the use of technology. Since I am a developer, I thought to create an app that would ease the whole process.

What it does

The app is based on an authenticated account linked to personal documents; in this way we make sure the user is unique. Having this security in place the app can assign permission to go out on a predefined rate, e.g. shopping once every 72 hours or sport once every 48 hours. The permission is associated to a security unique code that can be easily verified by police scanning a QR code or entering manually the code if the person prefers to carry a piece of paper when he goes out for sport for example. The check would immediately report to police the age of the citizen, the distance from his home and the time elapsed since the begin of activity. In this way it’s quickly clear if the person is respecting the restrictions or should be sanctioned basing on current rules. Obviously, the person must always carry personal documents (or a copy) that he associated with his account in the app.

How I built it

I have used React and material UI components to build the frontend user interface. For the backend instead I used Azure durable functions. Both the technologies are really powerful and very low cost. To quickly build the authentication I used Auth0 service which is free for the first 9k users. The backend can scale from zero to any number of users, because it’s cloud native. I’m confident that if the project would be adopted by some public authority as anti covid measure the cloud providers would offer resources for free. I have influent contacts in Microsoft and Auth0.

Challenges I ran into

To be honest I had only fun and pleasure building this solution. I am a seasoned developer so there was no technical challenge for me. Indeed, this development kept me busy during the lockdown so I avoided to become obsessed with the epidemic. Not to say I didn’t care, but I was watching the news only in the evening and working on something useful during the day. This project can easily morph into other use cases. I build the solution in a very modular component-oriented way, so it could be easily reused. Any user centric application is a good candidate.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I have completed ~70% of the application. I hope to finish soon so that I can focus more on public relations and find use cases or similar applications that can be adapted from this one.

What I learned

I knew already all the singular components making this app. But wrapping all together gave me new experience and insights that will be useful for the next steps in my developer career.

What's next for Akasa - Partial selective lockdown tool

I would be very happy to find new European contacts in the EUVsVirus event that could help me to find use cases for this application or useful in general for my skills. I any case I will complete the application since I’m almost done.

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