Quarantenados - Space Apps Challenge

Quarantenados| 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?

Forseti

Summary

How can we measure the efficiency of a biosafety measure before it is even applied? With different countries, cultures and degrees of urbanization, that's the challenge we choose, our solution? Creating a software for simulating a pandemic in many different situations, using Google Maps API for creating an almost perfect layout of the city and populating it using many different data sources for the most exact simulation possible. then we can compare results and display hotspots in the city!

How We Addressed This Challenge

Using different sources of data, we are able to create almost exact replica of any cities or states and approximate the behavior of its population, where they live and work, how often they go to certain stores, where are the hospitals in the city and many other factors taken into consideration. Then, we use this replica to simulate how the virus will spread throughout the region, you can control the simulation, so you can test how the mandatory use of masks, social distancing, and other methods would affect the environment, with that we can identify potential locations where the disease spread more than the average, identify which hospitals fill first, and mainly help to define a strategy to deal with COVID-19 and other diseases before they even arrive in the region.

How We Developed This Project

Q: Why choose the “Human Factors” challenge?

Among the impacts generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the areas of greatest discussion is social impacts. In a global crisis that is related to a health issue, it is extremely important that we do not separate the scientific research dynamics from the humanitarian social ones. The “human factors” challenge is linked to this point of interest, where our knowledge of the health field and its current needs can be connected with the information and technological skills of programming, promoting a dialogue capable of forming ideas that prove to be useful and applicable that would help not only to fight coronavirus, but also other diseases that may arise in the future.

Q: How does the software work?

First, we use Google Maps to create a replica of the selected region and get every place and how many visitors it has normally from Google Places. Then the program seeks the population from the last census and with data on global population density and the division of rural and urban areas we distribute the population in this virtual region. Finally, we simulate the routine of each person with the data acquired from google places and track their steps, running in parallel a mathematical model SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Removed) to simulate the disease spreading in the region.

Q: What tools, coding languages, hardware and/or softwares did you use to develop your project?

Planning: Google Docs, Google Sheets.
Software Development: Unity Engine with C# scripts, the Google Places API and MapBox SDK.
Video Production: Sony Vegas and Paint.net.

Q:What problems and achievements did your team have?

The difficulties related to our experience were: Obtain a problem-idea that emphasizes our challenge and that joins with the data and platforms provided by NASA and collaborators; prepare tools for the visualization and organization of the data we recruit for the formation of the platform; How to correlate the data from NASA and collaborators and from reference sources we collected with the effectiveness and impact of our simulation platform.
Achievements that we can point to were: The idea of software that used the geospatial data provided and the implementation of a focus on measuring the effectiveness of biosafety measures and link the knowledge we have for recruiting the information necessary to invest in the design of a tool aimed at simulation; Achieve outstanding differentials, such as the possibility of using the tool's information in the search for better strategies by governments and responsible agencies; Create a simplified and easy-to-view map for the information provided.