RankMe| Human Factors
Awards & Nominations
RankMe has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Human Factors
RankMe
Summary
RankMe is a tool that allows users to view statistics for each county in the United States in terms of COVID-19 risk levels, as well as a rating on a 1-100 scale for each county in three categories and overall, which allows users to both see their level of safety in their own location, and also potentially find locations where they would be safer from the virus. RankMe is the first service in the nation to provide a county-level COVID-19 risk assessment that incorporates multiple risk factors into its algorithm.
How I Addressed This Challenge
RankMe uses county-level data collected by the US Census, NY Times, CDC, NIH and other organisations to score each county in the United States in the categories of transmission risk, county preparedness, and socio-economic protections offered to residents (ex. prevention of eviction during lockdown period) , via an algorithm that takes into account over 15 factors, including population density, poverty rates, current rate of case increase, age demographic, hospital beds and ventilators per capita, and relative change in light pollution levels compared to pre-pandemic levels (gives an idea of to what degree the county has actually shutdown in the pandemic time). Data for each of these factors, compared with data from all counties in the US, is used to generate 1-100 scores for each category (transmission risk, county's medical preparedness to fight the virus, and protections). These three scores are then combined to produce a single score for every county nationwide.
How I Developed This Project
Our team was inspired to choose this challenge when we noticed that while plenty of data and trends are available on COVID-19 cases and deaths, there isn't yet a single site that uses a wide variety of data to come up with a comprehensive risk assessment.
RankMe uses space agency data to find changes in light pollution levels between pre-COVID and current levels by region, which serves as a rough indicator of the change in general activity of a region due to the pandemic (and thus can be used to estimate level of shutdown).
As a 1-person team, I started developing this project with just a small sample of counties. I first procured data sets, then wrote program to organise and analyse the data by FIPS county code, and use a weighted system with a custom-made scaling formula for various factors to produce the subscores and final ranking score. I then implemented the UI in HTML/CSS, then move on to supporting search for more and more counties.
Coding languages used in this project are: Java (for data processing and analysis - backend), and HTML/CSS and JavaScript (for site - frontend)
Editors used: Atom and Visual Studio Code
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
from space agencies: light pollution maps
CDC and NIH data
countyhealthrankings.org
US Census data
StackExchange for programming and debugging help :)