COVID Care — An app for all your COVID-19 related queries.

Dashboard, Chatbot, and Impacts of Covid-19 sections respectively

Breakout of Coronavirus has turned out to be one of the most dangerous events in the history of humanity. In today’s technologically advanced society where people depend on their mobile phones, tablets, and laptops, even for the smallest of things, technology plays a major role in helping people in such a dire situation. There were several problems faced by the people due to the outbreak of coronavirus like -
1. Lack of information about the symptoms of coronavirus.
2. Lack of information about preventive measures.
3. Lack of information about the areas heavily infected by the coronavirus.

Although as soon as the virus spread, the news channels swung into action to provide the latest news and information, WHO started conveying the preventive measures, the government started pursuing people to stay inside their homes and number of websites started providing global stats about coronavirus. But there was ONE big problem with that, all these things were scattered throughout the internet, on different websites. Different information was present on a different website, and it was a hassle for common masses to regularly go on these websites and check for updates.

So as technocrats, we — the members of team MAVERICKS — wanted to develop a single platform that can provide all possible assistance needed by the public. On the platform, people can —
1. Get the latest news relating to the virus.
2. Check themselves for possible symptoms.
3. Get notification about new cases in their vicinity.
4. Get the stats relating to the spread of coronavirus worldwide and nationwide.

PROJECT IDEA AND FEATURES OF THE APP

ChatBot:
Having a chatbot that can answer some of the questions a user might have helped in the long run of our app as Bots are available 24 hours a day throughout the year and if trained well, can answer some of the questions much faster than actual humans.

We looked at a lot of different chat frameworks but found IBM Watson a potent tool to work with. Watson Assistant also has a fairly easy to understand documentation.

While creating the Chatbot, we made sure to set the greeting that tells the user that this is indeed a chatbot, not a person behind the scenes. Fighting COVID-19 is important, and one way to do so is to make sure people are well informed and clear any doubts they might have related to it. The chatbot can help them take the necessary precautions required. That is exactly what our Chatbot tries to provide.

The conservation of a user with the Chatbot involves a set of nodes called dialogs, which are mostly the response we get from the user’s questions (Intents) and keywords (Entities).

So, we trained the Chatbot on a variety of intents to make it answer all sorts of possible questions a user might have like ‘What is COVID-19?’, ‘How often should you wash your hands?’, ‘What are the symptoms?’.

The Chatbot provides the user with a quiz when asked with ‘Do I have the disease?’ which checks the possibility of it by asking a few questions about their symptoms and travel history. This quiz follows a set path of answers we have inputted and asks the user to consult a doctor as this is not a replacement of one. Though this feature is not perfect and we are trying our best to improve it.

Tracker:
The idea to add a tracker showing all the real-time data is taken from the Arogya Setu App, the official app released by the Government of India for the Covid-19 pandemic. Further, we have added global Covid-19 statistics in the Tracker. Tracker section has a home page that shows global real-time data related to Covid-19, such as the number of cases, no of recoveries, no. of deaths, etc. Furthermore, there is a country section that shows the country name in decreasing order of the number of deaths. When we click on the country name, we will be shown country-wise data. There were various APIs available for this purpose.

However, we used the API https://corona.lmao.ninja/

Github repository for the JSON API https://github.com/NovelCOVID/API.

Cases Near me:
The idea was to develop a feature in which if a new case is found in a given radius around the user, then the user will get a notification about it. The idea was to use an API to get information about patients in different localities in a city. But due to lack of such an API, this idea got changed from locality level to district level. In this feature, the user will get regular notification about the number of cases in his/her district along with the feature to open a map and look at the stats of different districts of different states. As the API only provided data in JSON format, the heavy lifting of extracting the data and plotting it on the map must be done in the app itself, which takes quite some time. So, the map takes time to load and display data.

API: https://api.covid19india.org/state_district_wise.json

Tracker and News Update sections respectively

UI features:
1. Mostly used relative and linear layout.
2. Used grid layout and card view in the home section
3. The app opens with a splash screen.
4. Used Material Design.

Other features:
News and WHO updates:
We Wanted to put all Covid-19 related news in one place, hence provided weblink for all COVID-19 related news and WHO inside the app. User doesn’t have to rely on different sources for all Covid-19 related news. They can get all the latest news in one place.

Impact Of Covid-19

In this section, we have articles that describe the impact that Covid-19 has on the environment, humans, etc.

FUTURE SCOPE:

1. This quiz of chatbot follows a set path of answers we have inputted. Though this feature is not perfect and we are trying our best to improve it. We can train our chatbot for more questions so that it may answer most of the user’s questions/doubts related to Covid-19, which may not have been covered by us.
2. In the tracker part, we can add graphs and charts to make the statistics clearer to the user. Also, we can add state-wise Covid-19 stats for India, and this way, Indian users can benefit more from the app.
3. In cases near me, the maps take much time to open because most of the processing of data is done on mobile itself, which takes a considerable amount of time. To fasten up the process, we plan on creating an API that may provide us with processed data. It will take data from another API, and processing will be done on the server, and processed data will be made available for the app to display in the form of another API.

EXPERIENCES:

1. Manasi Agarwal: I faced a steep learning curve throughout this experience. But there was much support from my teammates and the HackOn community. All the webinars that were held gave me an insight into the different technologies that are currently being used and opened up a whole lot of fields that I can look into for the future. I also learned just how powerful technology is, especially when social distancing has become a must. We were forced to think about a lot of different ideas and how we can, in our way, help people and make their lives a little easier. I had much fun and felt like we were all present with the other teams thanks to discord.
2. Ayush Mishra: Great experience. The amount one learns in just a few days is incredible. This being our first online hackathon, we learned how important is proper communication between team members. For me, the most difficult part was making the video presentation for the mid-term and final evaluation, as I had no prior experience in video editing. But, now I have some experience which will undoubtedly be helpful in the future. Overall, it was fun participating in such an online event with new team members.
3. Aryan Mittal: This Hackathon was a great way to look closely at all the problems generated due to this pandemic, and the most significant part was to find an adequate solution and implement it. It not only taught me about new technologies but also helped me to understand that how important are these apps & website to track and control and how we can help a large number of people with such a creative idea. Such Hackathons not only cultivate a Developer mind but also gives a platform to help the society in the best possible way he/she can. So, I strongly suggest, to have more such hackathons in the future. Ultimately, it was much fun and a big thumbs up to efforts of all the team members as it never felt we are giving an online Hackathon.
4. Akshay Mall: Every hackathon brings on a new experience and teaches us something new. Hackathon is the best to learn something new and its implementation. This hackathon also taught me much stuff like the ground level implementation of AsyncTask class found in android. This hackathon also helped me get a good grasp of the multithreading concept that helped me speed up the data processing process as much as I can. Overall, an online hackathon was a new experience, and the knowledge gained was immense.

The members of the team, Mavericks, would also like to thank the sponsors of HackOn —
1. Google
2. GitHub
3. IBM
4. Elastic
5. Devfolio

And the organizers for organizing this hackathon and webinars that provided us with a lot of information and knowledge. We look forward to participating again in such events in the future.

Link to Project on Devfolio: https://devfolio.co/submissions/covid-care-1