Inspiration
As members of a wider society deeply affected by the COVID-19 shutdowns, we were inspired to create a platform which may give users peace of mind when venturing into a post-pandemic world, which could at the same time be a useful tool to assess the real-time risk of virus transmission, enabling public officials to rapidly address fluid reopening and closing of public spaces.
What it does
Displays a heat map of buildings in the area of focus. It shows metrics on the risk of entering a building based on the positive case rate in that city and the number of people in the building at any time. Allow businesses to input relevant data e.g. masks required, additional ventilation, maximum occupancy, any other COVID-19 precautions that will show up as a pop-up window when the user clicked on a building or location.
How we built it
We created a simple front-end (react) to display google maps with a heat map overlayed displaying the risk of certain areas in the city. We have a back-end (node.js and express) to store and calculate the risk factor of each building in the city.
Challenges we ran into
Practical implementation of the mathematical disease-spread model proved to be outside the scope of this Medhacks experience. Specifically had problems with density probability modelling, average velocity for the walking speeds of individuals in the businesses. Although the intended model (Gorscé et. al., 2014) was established and feasible, integration into our real-time web application required extensive numerical method techniques. These challenges are to be addressed in future work.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Adapted existing mathematical model for our own usage and finishing a minimum viable product to demo!
What we learned
We learned about how SIR, SEI models work in disease transmission and make needed adjustments within the mathematical models to simulate disease spread. We learned about the assumptions used to create these models and the governing principles behind the equations.
What's next for Real Time COVID-19 Risk Assessment
Deploy our first prototype, assess and gather feedback for improvement. We will also incorporate additional databases in our web app to validate our input values. Furthermore, we will implement a more sophisticated model by accounting for mask-wearing behavior with a scaling factor as well as respiratory protection factors to adjust our risk factors in the mathematical model.
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