The United States Outbreak Tracker

Inspiration

There is data on disease outbreaks across the internet, especially on sites like the CDC. However, unless that data is sensationalized in the news, people are unaware of these outbreaks and the risks they pose. We propose to change that by designing an app that can notify people of ongoing foodborne illness outbreaks, large-scale outbreaks like the Measles, and other outbreaks within states. With all this information conveniently located in one place, people will be better informed and can take specific actions to protect themselves using guidelines included in the app.

What it does

The goal of our app is to help inform and notify people of prevalent disease outbreaks in the United States. Diseases such as measles are becoming more common in today’s society and this app provides important information such as symptoms of the disease, what causes it, and a live map of where the disease is concentrated. With push notifications, important information can be transferred to the user and help them gain insightful information quicker, where a news story could not offer these same benefits. This is also important because it actively updates parents on where diseases are, while advising them the best course of action.

How I built it

Our app pulls real time data from CDC using a web crawler by the name of Octoparse.This web crawler accessed the data we needed in real time and updated every hour to give the user accurate data in the most recent timeframe. The crawler would collect the data and place it in a CSV file that could be added into our app. In the app, we created a scrolling layout in order to give our user an easy way to access the information they wanted and to look at it clearly. With text we explained the basics of the disease and created headers using the layouts of android studio.

Challenges I ran into

This project was quite difficult for us as we had to make sure it kept updating every hour, which was hard to achieve with our minimal skills in Android app development. While we had experience in HTML and CSS, we chose to make an Android in order to do something new and challenging. Additionally, we needed to use a web crawler that would create a csv file with our data in it every hour. It would then have to be added to the app as text, having been split at the commas.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We made a working app with data that has the potential to update every hour and provide life-saving advice. We managed to incorporate a web crawler.

What I learned

I learned that making apps on Android is finicky on my Mac, as things will download, then delete on their own if given time. This occurred with our CSV reader plugin. But, I also learned that Android Studio is quite useful in making easy to use, working apps.

What's next for The United States Outbreak Tracker

After we achieve a US version, we can make a global version. We can also have push notifications, which require an api that was not working while we were programming.

Built With

• android-studio
• csv
• java
• web-crawler