U.S. Disease Outbreak Map

Project Name

Project Description

Our project is a heat map of the U.S. showing infectious diseases. Our goal was to create a tool to visualize data in a way that is easy to understand and is able to be interacted with to show emerging patterns and quantitative data about infectious diseases throughout the U.S. This project is useful for researchers who want to visualize infection spread or to everyday people who might be curious what diseases are reported in their state.

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by a mass pandemic that happened within our lifetime which left a lasting impact on our lives. This project provides a different representation of data by visualizing it on a map of the U.S.

What it does

Shows a heat map of infectious diseases from a given database, with selected states showing number of cases and the most reported disease. Diseases can be selected which highlights all states that have reports of the disease.

How we built it

Built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and help from Claude and Copilot. Utilized dataset from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Utilized US-atlas NPM repository to construct the state outlines for the map.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into were finding data and organizing it into a usable format from databases in different formats. We wanted to utilize an API to automatically have the project update from the information received, but figuring out how to incorporate the function was difficult. Furthermore, datasets that did not have a consistent structure to the CDC NORS dataset did not function correctly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of a simple yet elegant design that shows useful information and emerging patterns of diseases in the United States throughout the years.

What we learned

We learned how to utilize 3rd-party datasets and creating a visual representation tool to help interpret the data.

What's next for U.S. Disease Outbreak Map

We hope to incorporate a system that does not require the user to import a dataset to see the results. Utilizing 3rd party APIs, we hope to remove the import system and allow the user to simply click and recieve.