Inspiration
Before the coronavirus pandemic, vaccine distribution and waste was a little known issue. Now it's one of the most relevant and pressing problems that world faces. Our team had noticed that government vaccine rollout plans were often vague and lacked the coordination needed to effectively distribute the vaccines. In light of this issue we created Vaccurate, a data powered vaccine distribution app which is able to effectively prioritize at risk groups to receive the vaccine.
What it does
To apply for a vaccine, an individual will enter Vaccurate and fill out a short questionnaire based off of government research and rollout plans. We will then be able to process their answers and assign weights to each response. Once the survey is done all the user needs to do is to wait for a text to be sent to them with their vaccination location and date! As a clinic, you can go into the Vaccurate clinic portal and register with us. Once registered we are able to send you a list of individuals our program deems to be the most at risk so that all doses received can be distributed effectively. Under the hood, we process your data using weights we got based off of government distribution plans and automatically plan out the distribution and also contact the users for the clinics!
How I built it
For the frontend, we drafted up a wireframe in Figma first, then used HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap to bring it to life. To store user and clinic information, we used a Firestore database. Finally, we used Heroku to host our project and Twilio to send text notifications to users.
Challenges I ran into
On the backend, it was some of our team's first time working with a Firestore database, so there was a learning curve trying to figure out how to work with it. We also ran into a lot of trouble when trying to set up a Heroku, but eventually got it running after several hours (can we get an F in chat). And although none of us thought it was a huge deal in the beginning, the time constraint of this 24 hour hackathon really caught up on us and we ran into a lot of challenges that forced us to adapt and reconstruct our idea throughout the weekend so we weren't biting off more than we could chew.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Overall, we are very proud of the solution we made as we believe that with a little more polish our project has great value to the real world. Additionally, each and every member was able to explore a new language, framework, or concept in this project allowing us to learn more too while solving issues. We were really impressed by the end product especially as it was produced in this short time span as we not only learnt but immediately applied our knowledge.
What I learned
Our team was able to learn more about servers with Gradle, frontend development, connecting to databases online, and also more about how we can contribute to a global issue with a time relevant solution! We were also able to learn how to compact as much work and learning as possible into a small timespan while maintaining communications between team members.
What's next for Vaccurate
The statistics and guidelines we presented in our project were made based off of reliable online resources, however it's important that we consult an official healthcare worker to create a more accurate grading scheme and better vaccination prioritization. Additionally, we would like to add features to make the UX more accessible, such as a booking calendar for both users and clinics, and the ability to directly modify appointments on the website.
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