bubble

bubble| Human Factors

Human Factors

The emergence and spread of infectious diseases, like COVID-19, are on the rise. Can you identify patterns between population density and COVID-19 cases and identify factors that could help predict hotspots of disease spread?

Summary

Bubble is a free, globally accessible contact tracing platform. Bubble will feature a publicly available map of where users with suspected or confirmed Coronavirus disease went in the last 2 weeks.People with a positive SARS-CoV-2 PT-PCR or equivalent test can input, to the best of their ability, the locations and times they visited in the past two weeks. For security, they will be required to upload their test for confirmation. The locations will be notified of the time of their visit and app users who live in the surrounding area will be pinged.

How We Addressed This Challenge

While a free contact tracing website could essentially be used globally, pandemic data will be used to focus on critically-affected areas where additional user incentive should be added. In regions determined to be at higher risk, Bubble will contact companies and local governments to sponsor the website. With the money raised, Bubble would be able to provide users a small cash incentive if they report their illness. For example, a user from an area of high population density may receive $1-3 for a report.

How We Developed This Project

Motivation:

My (Ashley’s) living situation has always been uniquely complicated. Ever since my little sister's leukemia diagnosis, every aspect of my family life has been fundamentally altered. In the beginning of high school, my father had a hemorrhagic stroke. My dad was sent to three different hospitals and two acute care facilities in the span of a year. Unfortunately, his stroke caused permanent brain damage and paralysis on the right side of his body. While I have always lived in constant fear for my family, the COVID-19 pandemic has produced an additional amount of stress on my family. Being able to protect my family by knowing if I have been exposed to COVID-19 would give me comfort and take some burden off my shoulders. I am by no means alone. Many of my teammates share the same concerns. Though I (Alexander) religiously practice social distancing and don a facemask like it is my lifeline, I worry constantly that by leaving my house I could inadvertently expose my elderly grandmother to COVID-19. As a result of our mutual concerns, we decided to come together and design a web app to help us know if we came in contact with somebody infected with COVID-19. With this knowledge we would be able to self-isolate before we became symptomatic to protect those in our family.

Approach and Background:

While contact tracing is by no means new, it has been employed more than ever before and to the greatest success during the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries like South Korea were able to use location data based contact tracing to great success and prevent exponential growth of cases. As privacy concerns are a large issue in the United States, our group decided to create a solution that would maintain anonymity of users, be entirely voluntary, and not actively track the user’s location data.

We are a team of high school seniors who have never met each other and span the U.S from California to Connecticut driven by a shared passion for technology and social good. We all have varying degrees of experience, so we decided to divide tasks to capitalize on each member’s strengths.

To divide the work efficiently between members, we split up the front-end and back-end development of our app. The front-end is composed of HTML and CSS with JavaScript elements to send HTTP requests to the backend. The back-end is an API which manages all the data needed and generated by the front-end. The back-end is written in Python using the flask framework to handle requests.

Use of Data:

While the idea of contact tracing is by no means novel, our team takes a new spin on the idea by deciding to use data to provide financial incentive for COVID-19 positive patients to share where they went in the past two weeks. Our project uses data from the U.S Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey and Population Density Data to identify regions of higher risk to COVID-19. The team will then focus efforts to provide financial incentive for people to report their infection to help break chains of infection in vulnerable areas.