The Space_Panthers team started the challenge with one idea in mind: to find patterns between the data from space agencies and socioeconomics factors. Along the way we faced many difficulties as the data was scattered throughout many websites and not always updated or with the same periodicity. From this problem was born the BCAC project, which aims to merge all useful information in one dashboard and help people around the world better visualize and understand the present and future impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in their countries. On the dashboard, the user will be able to select areas or countries, parameters such as mobility, unemployment rate, pollutant and greenhouse gases concentration.
Our project was developed in two stages: Data research and software development. In the first stage, we focused in the search of different kinds of data: economics, urban mobility and satellite. In the economics data we found some trouble: a major part of that data was out of date, and the periodicity was far too long. Since the coronavirus pandemic is literally brand-new, there’s not much information about unemployment, bankrupt companies, etc. Another problem was encountered when we tried to seek that data in differents countries, the most part of that data was very confusing and out of date. So, for this POC we decided to focus in our country (Brazil) and more precisely in the state of São Paulo. In our research we looked for satellites image datasets from MODIS, Sentinel 2 and Sentinel 5P (to gather polluting gas data as well as other environmental parameters), and also Google Mobility Report data. The biggest trouble we had was in our discussion about this data: what can it tell us? We literally spent hours thinking and discussing about how we could make sense of all of this. After all our discussions, we finally got some insights and an answer: the emission of polluting gases and the Google Mobility Report can tell us a lot about local economy. So, in certain way, we can “fill a gap” from the lack of economics data and understand how the region is changing through the COVID-19 pandemic. We decided to develop a web app where all this data can be shown and be related to each other. So, anyone who uses this web app can understand better how the world has changed and also how to adapt or even think about solutions to this brand-new world. Example: a policy-maker could use our platform to understand how his region was affected by COVID-19 and work on strategies to improve the life quality of the population in these times.
In the development stage we did:
Through the process of development we found some difficulties: temporal scale of the data made the analysis difficult, especially the economic ones, which are at least 3 months behind.
If we had more time to develop our application, the idea would be to start gathering data from other states in Brazil and even other countries so that more people would be able to use it. Enhancing the user experience would also be one of the next steps to help them get even better insights about the pandemic.
You can access the web app here: http://app-bcac.co/
Video: https://youtu.be/hxeYXLOzkgs
Image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vDn4DURQCAdTrl6ZaJtd_uVzfv979aDX/view?usp=sharing