Troy Tech| 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.

COVID-19 Human Activity Visualizer

Summary

Using satellite images of 10 locations around the world, our app produces images showing the average activity over the past 5 years; then allowing people to see the contrast between average activity and COVID-19 activity by month with a "time" slider. While some of our locations are controls (places that did not shut down or have little activity to begin with), we tried to pick locations that are often overlooked in COVID-19 infection reports. We do this by pulling information from NASA’s Earth API and calculating the difference in light produced.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We have tracked human activity in places where various policies have been enacted to battle COVID-19, showing how effective these practices such as quarantines and stay at home orders are at mitigating human contact, and thus disease transmission.

How We Developed This Project
  • While viewing media coverage, isolated anecdotes and individual incidents tend to dominate headlines and coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, media coverage using skewed data often does not accurately describe the pandemic’s overall conditions or the extent of society’s response. Furthermore, media coverage often fails to highlight the pandemic’s impact on lower income areas and underdeveloped countries. Our app seeks to give users direct access to data to allow them to analyze their community’s response to the outbreak.
  • We used NASA’s Earth API along with other APIs in order to compare historical trends of human activity to current trends affected by COVID-19 based on light levels. We used Android Studio with Java in order to develop our project.
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources

Nasa Earth API

HerokuApp Covid API

Tags
#satelliteimages #economic #covidimpact #humanactivity #covid19
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.