Challenge number 9, Human Factors, embodies the importance of evaluating the effects of demographic density in the spotting the contamination hotspots of COVID-19. Exploring the relationship between insufficient epidemiological surveillance and poor usage of data made our team realize the exponential increase of infected citizens in those regions, usually in the metropolis. Given a gradual spread to suburban cities, the virus started to silently attack those communities that do not have the resources to defend themselves. As a consequence, those places would seek medical aid in bigger towns, with greater population density and higher percentual rates of infected individuals. Therefore, given the high demand, there are big regions incapable of surveilling the traffic of its citizens, while peripherical locations suffer from under recording. That being said, our team developed an app capable of monitoring the symptoms of circulating citizens, as a way to stop the disease from spreading from one area to another, while also saving their data into the database, which can be applied to calculate the stage of development of a disease, the main transmission points and which percentage of the population is more infected.
Our project was inspired by an operational problem happening in several cities in Brazil: the need to establish sanitary barriers to stop the spread of Covid-19. What ends up happening in most places in the process of manual diagnosis, which has proven to be highly ineffective and be a waste of human resources, as well as running the chances of not being used at all. Alongside that, there is also an imminent risk of contamination of the government workers allocated to such a task . For we are a team that comes from multiple backgrounds, we were able to compare and contrast our experiences throughout Brazil to observe the overall inefficiency of this process. We also observed the lack of research about COVID-19 infections in suburban communities, which motivated us to seek a fairer and more integrated system to monitor the effects of the pandemic. Our approach consisted of the analysis of hardships that affect our communities directly and the comparison with the impacts in other regions worldwide, using the data available mainly in NASA online sources, therefore creating an alternative that can be applied in several places, even those communities that do not have access to the internet. Focusing mainly on third-world and inept countries, we sought a way to control the spreading of the infectious disease, considering the absence of testing kits. We had some technical problems to gather all the desired components on our prototype, although we do still intend on adding them to our final version. Other issues arose in the cybersecurity provisions, which will also be refined to improve the actual system. Our achievements range from a very cheap manufacturing cost, which is less than U$30,00 (R$150,00), to a great team dynamic, with all processes running right on time in a professional, mutual and respectful manner. In conclusion, this experience did not only aid us in understanding and diving deeper into our passions (and find new ones) but also leaves us with a legacy of fondness towards our colleagues and the NASA team.
-Tools/coding languages, ... :
https://youtu.be/V5vOfyKoYvI