Rona

Rona is an AI driven bot that allows users to perform a COVID-19 self test, Coupled with an analytics channel tuned to provide granular risk assessment and real-time trend analysis across the country

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Inspiration

I saw the misinformation that was being spread mainly through social media platforms. Most of this was through chatting which seems to be something most people love doing. So I saw it would be a good idea if there could be a platform where they could clarify the same misinformation, through a chat interface.

Also, the Cabinet Secretary of Ministry of Health in Kenya, spoke on Radio and said that it cost Ksh 2500 to run a single test, which on most cases needed to be run more than once on a single sample, to confirm the accuracy. This cost is the same irregardless of whether the test turns out positive or negative.

I saw it necessary to integrate a feature that would allow identification of potential candidates for testing, therefore, reducing the cost of testing by testing the persons who are marked as highly risky.

What it does

Rona is an AI driven bot that provides COVID-19 educational content and allows users to perform a self test and assess their risk of having the COVID-19

Rona is also coupled with an advanced analytics channel tuned to provide granular risk assessment and real-time trend analysis across the country. and track the disease spread across counties in Kenya with graphs that can visualize the state and help flatten the curve by allowing several measures to be taken.

It also visualizes all the counties in Kenya which are restricted for travel within Kenya to enable truck drivers and logistic providers to plan their routes better

How I built it

I built a custom NLP algorithm to analyze user's questions and optimized it with IBM Watson, and a web crawler to search the internet for COVID-19 related news from verified news sites, which I optimized with IBM Watson Discovery

I also built an API to fetch the county level statistics from a remote daataset that I manually built by collecting data reported since the first case in Kenya.

Challenges I ran into

I encountered challenges gathering the data and building a remote dataset for the disease spread across counties. However, I searched from various News pages and also the Government's website and built the dataset.

What I learned

How to optimize custom machine learning models with IBM Watson services.

How to build a dataset from scratch and build an API to fetch the data from that dataset to the platform

Through the talks administered by the Quarantine Hackathon officials, I have learnt how to think of long term solutions that are they key drivers for sustainable innovation

What's next for Rona

Next Phase: Rona aims to partner with organizations that may find the data we collect useful, and also partner with hospitals to allow users who find they have a high likelihood of having COVID 19, to dial in to hospitals and get online support.

Long term goals: Rona aims to be a social entreprise that provides grabular risk assessment tools for real time trend analysis for various diseases.

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