Inspiration
During Covid-19 pandemic the Greek government added a new obligatory requirement, the citizens should send an sms or fill their name and address on a piece of paper, before exiting their house. The message should contain the reason of the exit and the address of the citizen.
Using this method, when someone is diagnosed as infected the government can easily track the number of times they exited their house, but they are not able to track who he made contact with and for how many hours he was out of his home.
What it does
Previt consists of two applications, one lightweight mobile application that is used by the citizens and one application that is used by analysts.
The mobile application should be used during a pandemic, when someone exits his house. The app starts tracking his location which gets reported to a centralized secure server. After this person gets infected the analysts can easily track all the people that this infected person probably made contact with and examine them before their first symptoms. Identifying infected people even before their first symptom would prevent them from spreading the disease.
Other features include
- Alerts when two people are too close.
- Alerts in case of many house exits.
- Notifications and heatmaps of areas.
- Section with virus related news.
- Mark citizens that belong in vulnerable groups and act fast in case they get infected.
How to build it
Backend
Previt requires a scalable backend which uses a database that supports fast geospatial queries in order to save and query all the coordinates. The application can be hosted and deployed with the serverless model which will be able to handle millions of requests efficiently.
Citizen App
The citizen app should be a lightweight mobile application, that targets all mobile platforms. The citizen app uses geolocation APIs in order to track and report the user location. Furthermore the citizen app can be connected to the government's oAuth for fetching details and validating the citizen.
Analyst UI
The Analyst UI can be a web application which provides all the information to the analysts. There are going to be tools that, provided the name of a citizen and a time period yield all the citizens he made contact with (directly or not). This UI will also include heatmaps and alerts in order to act fast in case of a possible virus spreading.
Legal
The application is going to be fully compliant with the GDPR, location data will remain private without any third party access. Furthermore this app could be optionally, developed and deployed in the government's infrastructure, access to the analysts portal is going to be allowed only to authorized personnel.
In the scope of this hackathon a web UI was created, which represents the base features of the apps.
Open challenges
Development
The application should be able to handle millions of requests and store millions of data points efficiently.
Business
Trust related to data producing and consuming, data ownership and collaboration with other organizations, the government.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Being able to propose a feasible solution that would save lives and prevent the spreading of a pandemic.
What's next for previt - Pandemic Prevention
Form a team, define the business plan, develop and deploy the application.
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