Quarantine++

An app which makes self-isolation during the lockdown period a fun and enjoyable thing

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Inspiration

As lockdowns begin to ease up, more people are beginning to travel abroad, which leads to people being stuck in quarantine facilities for a few weeks. As a consequence, people have found it challenging to entertain and occupy themselves with the amount of time they have on their hands. We decided to take up this project to make self-isolation a fun and enjoyable experience for people.

What It does

Quarantine++ is a user-friendly app that allows users to choose an array of things like weather, news, books,etc.

When the user enters the website, he/she needs to log-in using their gmail id by clicking the menu (in the top-right) and then entering their temperature. This temperature will be stored in a firebase database which can be accessed by quarantine officers.

The user can choose the option to entertain themselves by clicking on ‘Entertainment’ or ‘Upcoming Event’ in the menu system. The ‘Entertainment’ section includes Games, Books, News and Weather and the ‘Upcoming Event Section’ includes Entertainment, Hackathons, Courses, CTFs and Live Streams that are planned in the near future.

If the user does not feel well, he/she can click the emergency button that will send an alert to the server and the actions will be taken accordingly.

Key Features

Our app has been designed as a PWA AKA a progressive web app In our project, we used encrypted data using google OAuth that allows the information to be within the client and the server side. We use a dynamically updating Firebase database to store the temperatures of the people for medical reasons We use Python to scrape information from the internet so that it may be displayed to the user We have used JS web frameworks such as AJAX, as well as CSS frameworks like Bootstrap to make the UI/UX more friendly The whole app is hosted with the help of heroku

How we built it

For the frontend we used vanilla html and css (bootstrap) and JS (AJAX). For the backend we used python. We hosted the server on heroku so that it could be used by others. Our dynamically updating database was made using Firebase The web-scraping mechanism was done using requests structured as a REST API We have also utilized Google’s OAuth authentication to facilitate safe and secure log-ins

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges over the course of this hackathon

We had some difficulty thinking of a topic for this hackathon, and consequently had many disagreements between ourselves We were not very comfortable with JS, and web frameworks in particular, and had to learn that from scratch We faced some issues with regards to the cohesiveness of the CSS and HTML files Most of us had never used Heroku as a hosting platform before Finding the right way to scrape from the websites was also very hard

What we learned

Through our experience in GIIS Hackathon, we learnt both soft skills and hard skills

We learnt a lot about JS in general and its frameworks We learnt how to host our servers on heroku We learnt how to properly web-scrape We learnt how to work as a team despite having our differences We learnt the importance of time-management and optimism

Accomplishments we’re proud of

We are proud of the following accomplishments

Having a fully-finished and fully-functional product Incorporating most details which we had initially thought of in this short time span Since our server is on heroku, it can be used and accessed by others at any point of time.

What's next for Quarantine++

Incorporate plug-ins to popular music and streaming services such as YouTube, Netflix and Spotify Try to make this product more prominent and scaled: We have already begun trying to accomplish this feat with our dynamically updating Firebase database, as well as the Google OAuth log-in system. However, there is still some work that can be done in the upcoming ideas sections, particularly for people living in different countries

Team Details

Member 1: Ajay Arvind, 12 - A

Member 2: Palaksha Drolia, 12 - A

Member 3: Ramanathan Sagar, 12 - A

Member 4: Siddhant Nair, 12 - A

Category - Web App

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