Lightside - Space Apps Challenge

Lightside| Light the Path

Light the Path

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated changes in human population movements and activities around the world. Your challenge is to use Earth observations to explore how human activity and regional land-based human movement patterns may have shifted in response to COVID-19.

Light Up

Summary

The challenge Light the Path consists in using Earth observation data to explore how regional patterns of human activity and overland movement may have changed in response to the COVID-19 crisis. The Light Up project does this by creating a platform which brings that data to the general public's attention with a friendly and interconnected approach. In that manner, the users are able to visualize and understand the consequences which the coronavirus pandemic has over human movement. Therefore, those people have access to a trustworthy source of information that they can use to take action in their region.

How We Addressed This Challenge

The Light Up project searches to solve the matter of how to communicate, to the general public, changes in population movement related to the Covid-19 crisis in a accessible and easily comprehensible way. The adopted solution is a platform in which data, as, for example, alterations in demographic density and greenhouse gas emission, is disposed in an entertaining way. Such information is obtained from images and readings made by satellites about, for instance, intensity of city lights at night and levels of nitrogen dioxide emission. Therefore, our project relates to the challenge in the sense that it is a way to explore Earth observation data to analyse changes in human movement patterns inflicted by the current pandemic.

How We Developed This Project

The inspiration for choosing this challenge comes from the desire to light the way through knowledge, making scientific information available to everyone in an accessible and friendly way, taking into account the large part of the population that does not have the theoretical basis to understand the large volume of data and research of the current moment. Therefore, our team developed the project by addressing the extensive amount of available data provided separately and creating a relationship between them and human activities, and explaining how the interpretation of that data reflects the changes caused in the current way of life and also how it makes it important in actions to prevent COVID-19.

In this context, the main problems faced by the team was to define the target audience, given that this influences the project as a whole. When it was defined that this audience would be the general population, it was possible to define aspects such as the approach to the information that we would bring to this audience, choosing to explain the topics in a summarized way at first and encouraging these people to embark on an educational and dynamic mission that would have three levels of complexity. It would then be the user's choice to choose a basic approach to the issues at first and then move on to further depth. After these educational sessions, the user would understand the importance of isolation measures and how they are being effective or not, this being the type of knowledge that is important for everyone to take actions of an essential nature in the prevention of COVID-19.