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?

D-Track

Summary

D-Track (Disease Track) monitors users’ health, measuring blood pressure and oxygen levels, respiratory and heart rates, and so on. It also sends daily reports to local health organizations, informing them about the risk factors in their communities. D-Track not only helps to avoid future pandemics, but also to build a society that lives healthier and longer lives. Our next step focuses on creating a global impact, making it accessible to all, as a primary health care product.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Based on the data provided by NASA and its international partnerships, besides national open data, to deeply analyze the specific conditions in our country, we were able to identify the patterns between infectious diseases, like COVID-19, and population density. It is noticeable how regions with higher population densities have also higher infection rates. Urbanization and agglomeration were confirmed to play a significant role in the spread of a disease, as we observed.  In this way, we developed D-Track as an alternative tool that allows the traceability of its users with possible alteration in their health status, guaranteeing a more efficient control of the propagation of the virus, besides promoting early diagnosis.

How We Developed This Project

What inspired our team to choose this challenge was because, as humans, we were interested in comprehending better our role and impact in the spread and control of infectious diseases, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, we figured that, by joining efforts, we would be able to develop an alternative solution to avoid future diseases, on this global scale, contributing to world evolution. We broke the process down into individual tasks and roles, according to each member's strengths and skills, establishing deadlines and a series of discussions to share ideas and opinions, besides basing our whole project on the data provided by Nasa and its international partnerships. By thoroughly analyzing all the data, we were able to prove that regions with higher population density presented a higher incidence of infection rates and fatalities by COVID-19. Also, we verified that social distancing violations were responsible for an increase in the number of confirmed cases and deaths. COVID-19 cases were first confirmed in large human centers, instead of smaller regions. To turn our project into reality, we used different tools, such as Trello, to plan our activities in an organized way; Discord and Google Meets, to arrange meetings to discuss our ideas; Adobe Illustrator, to create the prototypes of the screens of our app D-Track; Jupyter Notebook, for the data cross-checking between population density and COVID-19 incidence; Sony Vegas Pro to edit our final video for the demonstration of our solution; and NASA WorldView, to obtain more global and local data. As problems, we had a lot of doubts concerning the viability of our project, like medical ethics and the legal basis. Also, one of the most challenging parts was the development of the solution demonstration, as we thought about how to make it more attractive and, at the same time, how to summarize our entire project in mere 30 seconds. Our achievements were much more numerous than the problems we faced. We were able to establish strong connections with each other, follow the deadlines and tasks assigned, besides the demonstration of each member's amazing skills and contributions. Our team was made of six completely different individuals who were able to work together in order to make this project possible.

Tags
#humanfactors #diseaseprevention #monitoring #traceability #geolocation #mobileapp #wearable #smartwatch
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.