The Isolation Solution

Social distancing policies enacted the world over during the COVID-19 pandemic have left many people socially isolated. Your challenge is to develop innovative solutions to combat social isolation.

GoNoKami

Summary

The outbreak of COVID-19 witnessed months of social-isolation resulting in a detrimental impact on mental health globally. Our application can be used by the government to methodize lockdown norms while ensuring social distancing rules are obliged. Through this app, citizens will be able to request visit permits to public places. The data collected through this app will be crossed-verified with satellite imagery to ensure that all tracked locations are not exceeding the maximum occupancy.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Studies indicate isolation as a psychological trigger to increased violence and stress which is reflected through protests against governments, increased cases of domestic violence and divorce, and increased substance abuse.

Our platform can be used by the government to normalize lockdown norms and allow access of public places ensuring social distancing. After relaxing prolonged lockdown measures, high population density can be expected in parks, streets, and other public places. Our interface can regulate this problem by ensuring social distancing regulations by collecting data of the maximum allowable human population at government-approved places. This will be done through a visit-request system created on the platform, which will ensure citizens will only be approved to visit non-clustered areas.

This will regulate further spread of COVID-19 or any such pandemics in future and will advance to the notion of a smart city.

How We Developed This Project

What inspired us?

We witnessed overcrowded public places in Japan when the state of emergency was removed. This violation of social distancing can inflict the second wave of COVID-19 and all these months of lockdown will be in vain. We are AbeNoMask and our idea is to create a more evolved organization in society to enforce and monitor social distancing.

How it was developed?

1. Collection of the Park Data

A majority of the park data was obtained using a web- scraping tool. The data was then used to cross-reference data obtained from satellites to get the estimation of the land area of every respective park in the dataset. In addition, address and location data were also obtained.

2. Citizen Data 

Ideally, governments will use their own citizen identification numbers to populate accounts. For example, in Japan “My Number” is the unique identifier used for all citizens of Japan. Thus, for the demonstration of this proof of concept, the application requires the user to input their “My Number”. All other relevant data can be either manually inputted by the user, or auto-populated by the government organization.

3. Calculation of Safe Occupancy 

This is done by following the social distancing practice of at least 2m radius per person. Once a value for the area of a park can be determined. That number is divided by 2.5m squared to estimate, a safe occupancy level for that park. However, using Landsat Surface Reflectance Data we would like to further improve the accuracy of the area of the park. Specifically, we would run a Machine Learning Model to determine the area of the bodies of water located in a park. For instance, if the park contains a body of water where humans would not normally occupy, we can subtract the surface area of the body of water from the total.

4. Design of the Interface

The design of the interface was done using a popular API called Flask. It was designed to be simple and barebone as possible to prove that the concept would work. There are pages for the following: 1) Registration of Account, 2) Login Page, 3) List of Available Parks, 4) Making a Request to Visit a Park, 5) List of all Active Requests, and 5) Account Settings.

5. Design of the SQL database

The SQL database was designed using SQLite. There are three major tables:  1) Users, 2)  Parks, and 3) Reservations.

Relationships:

  • Users have a one to many relationship with Reservations
  • Parks have a one to many relationship with Users

6. Deployment of the Site

The site is deployed for free using Heroku.

Future Work?

  • Design a time-allowance system
  • Use Machine Learning to calculate a safe occupancy level for each park.
  • Scale the system to include any public place where clusters could form. For example,  amusement parks, concerts, shopping centers, swimming pools, and gyms.
  • Use Nasa's nighttime lights dataset to determine which prefectures have increased and decreased human activity. Based on this information, the site can provide citizens with either recommendations or permission to travel between prefectures. 

Stuff Used

Tools:

  • Webscape

Coding languages:

  • Python
  • HTML, CSS

Built with:

  • Flask
  • SQLite
  • Heroku

Software:

  • Premiere Pro
  • Powerpoint
  • Word

Link to Final Application:
GoNoKami

Project Demo

YouTube Video Link (Demonstration Video)

Website Link(Final Product)

Tags
#SocialDistancing #SocalDistance #COVID-19 #Social_isolation #psychology #psychological_impact #smartcity #Interface #API #outbreak #ML #MachineLearning #Web
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.