Oversight

Oversight| 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

With the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries and states have issued guidelines to prevent the spread of the disease. On the contrary, to effectively containing the spread, there are many negative consequences to these strict measures. The Oversight project seeks to bring awareness towards the possible factors tied to the spreading of the virus and the effects of radical countermeasures, in order to emphasize the importance of prevention during a pandemic through a simple browser game.

How We Addressed This Challenge

There are various factors that contribute to the spread of the disease and they are unique to different regions of every country, which makes it impossible to simply observe one small patch of the entire earth and state what contributes to the spread. Furthermore, in such a short time since the outbreak, the data available to investigate this topic is insufficient to say the least. Our team worked on the challenge “Human factors”, and placed emphasis on developing a solution which could be further developed to act as a tool to identify these factors - an interactive game where social behavior of a certain region is modeled, and users can make decisions and observe its consequences.

Oversight is a browser game where the player is challenged to contain a deadly virus until a vaccine is developed.

The player is given a bird's-eye view of a city where civilians conduct daily activities.
When a virus outbreak is introduced, the player is tasked to click on civilians to "test" whether they are infected or not. If they are, they will be quarantined in the hospital, and will be dismissed or pass away after a certain amount of time (game run time) based on their immunity.
The player will have a limited amount of tests he can conduct per day. While the infected civilians are walking around undetected, they will continue to spread the virus to people around them, and after a certain amount of time, the civilian will show symptoms and be tested. The player must effectively detect the infected civilians while making sure that they do not run out of test kits, as there is a limit on the number of tests available and/or all hospitals in the area reach their maximum capacity.
The city landscape will be randomized every time the player starts a game, and there will be several levels of difficulty which can be selected by the player. Increasing the difficulty will increase the population density and decrease the number of hospitals/availability of tests.
At the end of the game, a vaccine is made and the player will be shown their overall score. In order to stimulate more strategic thinking, the scoring system will take into account the economic deficit that arises from quarantining more people. The economic impact can be observed by calculating how many people go to work or visit the shopping areas vs the people quarantined at the hospital or staying indoors.

Through this game, we hope to have more people be educated and informed about the importance of social distancing and self quarantine. Although it is a generalization of a bigger population given that the game can only have a certain number of civilians, by including more data and building a more sophisticated point mechanism, we believe that the game will be able to work as a model of actual real human activity and simulate and predict the severity of the spread of COVID-19.

Since we are using a browser interface to host the game, the reach and target audience is basically anyone with an Internet connection and a browser. With COVID-19 forcing people to stay indoors, playing an educational game like the one we propose would add some value to people’s increased time on the internet. Terms like “Social Distancing” and “Self-Isolation” may have seemed like jargon to many people, and watching Oversight in action would have helped them understand the need and the benefit for such measures and its immediate impact.

We believe that the global pandemic was handled differently by various countries and regions. Some methods were a huge success while some turned out to be bad judgement calls. We feel that the best solution would have been balancing health effects with economic effects and not prioritizing one over the other. We envision it like a balance scale where increased measures in keeping people healthy must be coupled with measures to keep the economy of the region stable. Oversight simulates this challenge in the form of a browser game that enables players to make strategic and innovative decisions under the constraint of time and resources, which is similar to what world nations faced and continue to experience as an effect of the pandemic.

How We Developed This Project

Our team was inspired to choose this challenge because we wanted to approach the challenge from a practical aspect to come up with a solution that would leave an impact. Additionally, since we are a 4 member group with different backgrounds, we thought this challenge was complex but also allowed us to approach it from various perspectives.

We began our project by observing the concept of the basic reproduction number, or the R0 value to understand how the transmissibility is characterized, and familiarizing available resources from the hackathon website.

Then, we discussed what game mechanics and rules we had in mind such that the game would be interesting and appealing to a wide range of audience, where we discussed further details of how we could incorporate data without over-complicating the game.

After identifying basic mechanics, we discussed what data was essential as the first step to applying some realism to the game. When considering important factors that are needed in modelling a city, our group first identified that the economic profile and data on the population (e.g. population density, age distribution and average income) is crucial as the basis of describing long term human activity. We observed the NASA SEDAC database to determine how to implement levels of difficulty in the game. As many countries had a population distribution as shown in the graph and higher population densities typically results in an increase in human interaction, we decided to vary the level by urbanizing the landscape and have an increased number of people. The Population statistics for countries, eg: Netherlands, from NASA SEDAC inspired us to set game levels - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DeQV95VseUr5tWI4nXoxyyfT3Lx5Qq7d/view?usp=sharing

We also discussed incorporating more data to have a more dynamic gameplay. We decided to attempt to investigate the correlation between weather and human activity by corresponding weather forecasts and traffic/travel data. With these decisions made, we observed various open source data specifically for the duration of the pandemic, from Meteomatics, ESA Aeolus Online Dissemination System, and NYC Open Data.

As our focus was developing a solution, efforts were distributed to working on a prototype and design concept of the game. First step was choosing a catchy name for our game and to create a cool logo for it, as a game must be a marketable product for it to have maximum reach and impact. Hence, we collectively chose the name "Oversight".

Oversight was developed in JavaScript so that it could run on browsers. A modern entity-component-system data model was chosen for game logic, which was powered by ecsy library by Mozzila. Game graphics are rendered in WebGL with Pixi.js library. Other static entities like the game logo were designed and embedded using HTML, CSS. The game was hosted using the SpaceApps Challenge offer by Neustar in the URL - http://playoversight.co/

Features of the game:

A layout grid consisting of houses, work buildings, parks, shopping areas and hospitals.
People are indicated as dots on the layout grid moving between locations. The green dots indicate healthy people and the red dots indicate sick people who are eligible for testing.
On clicking one of the dots, the person’s profile and their travelled path is shown. The player can then choose if they want to test the person or not.
When a person is tested, they are sent to the hospital building, where they occupy a bed and thus reduce the number of test-kits and beds available by 1.
As the game progresses, the player can choose to shut down certain areas of the grid as a strategic move to curb the pandemic.
The player is shown statistics like % of population affected by the pandemic, time left in the game, weather forecast, daytime/nighttime, total tests and hospital beds available and number of recovered patients.

The Game Design that we envisioned is as shown - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BmILeNeaYOROKrTLIeJ3P9DDYm3Nj0F8/view?usp=sharing

Since the project has not yet implemented all functions to the game, there are several points that we plan to improve on given more time. These are:

Simulating number of hospital beds available and test kits available during gameplay by analyzing and generating these numbers from the Tableau COVID-19 Data Hub
Introduce day/night cycle and weather to influence the movement of people in the grid, and thereby the spread of the virus. The weather forecast can be simulated from Meteomatics or similar weather APIs
Assigning a descriptive profile for each civilian in the game according to a selected city’s population data, but assigning random hobbies/gender/age and other characteristics. Data for such characteristics can be generated from the NASA SEDAC Database
Implement a policy mechanism by closing certain industries or buildings and forcing a certain occupation or customer-base to refrain from travelling for a fixed amount of time (game runtime). The economic impact will be drawn from generalizing the economic impact every country has had from its response to the pandemic to halt industrial activities with certain policies introduced.
Simulating gameplay scenarios dependent on weather, day/night within a short time, eg: 10 mins real time as the game runtime and consolidating scores
Spreading more awareness and connecting the game dynamics with the real-world effects by redirecting the player to the NASA SEDAC country or city profile that matches the game’s difficulty level. For example, once the player has played a simulation of say 500 people in 10 mins and witnessed the challenge, we can redirect them to NASA SEDAC’s statistics on Vatican City during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The coding for our project “Oversight” is located at our GitHub page - https://github.com/chemicstry/covid19_spaceapps_mission

We hope to expand on our work here in the coming months and the repository is publicly available so that interested coders can contribute to our project.