Trace Your Steps

After learning about the difficulty of finding every exact location you have visited and when after someone contracts coronavirus, I thought that maybe geo-location data would be key. But like most people, I don't want apps in my phone storing my location on their servers and using it to track me.

That's when I came up with the idea to store location data automatically into the phone's local storage so that it can only be exported when you actually need it (eg: you contract the virus).

By being able to manage your personal location data, you would be able to assist the government and healthcare departments of your country to contact the places you have been and track down who possibly passed the virus onto you, or who you had passed it onto.

If many users came onto the app, the World Health Org could allow you to update your data to them and they could then use data analytics to find where infected people have come into contact with others. This would be the end goal of the app, but in it's current form, being able to save lives through tracking of locations just for individual infections would still be an achievement.

I used Ionic Framework which is an open source mobile app development tool which can generate native apps for android, windows and ios, as well as mobile websites. I chose this framework as it is lightweight and it would be easy to verify by any developer whether it sends the data anywhere.

I had to use the ionic geolocation tool, along with the Google Maps Geocoding api to convert the gps coordinates into specific addresses before storing them in the phone.I also had to use ionic storage as it is a simple storage API which uses various local storage types to keep the data safe and secure.

The challenge I had was actually tweaking a few bugs at the end of the process, as I only learnt about this hackathon a few hours ago. I didn't even get a chance to properly style it or render it into a website. I don't mind though, as the concept is more about data ownership and could be incorporated into other coronavirus apps as a simple feature.

I'm proud that I could put this together within a few hours after being quite fatigued from other projects, but I would be extremely proud if offline data storage became more prominent for users to be able to be control of their data for purposes such as tracing their steps to combat deadly viruses.

If there is a good response, I would finalise the app and push it to stores. I would hope responsible people would use it while in quarantine and that it would help them when going out to know that they can track everywhere they have been.