The NASA SpaceApps Challenge 2020 proved to be a good opportunity to work as a group in favor of presenting a solution to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team designed a web platform capable of tracking the vulnerability of health systems, first thinking of the 5570 municipalities in Brazil, but which can be scaled globally.
Through open data from different institutions, the platform can simulate a place where there is a greater chance of helping people who need medical care the most, removing the overload of professionals and health structures.
Some Facts
In January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) began investigating a cluster of medical cases caused by a new strain of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. It causes the disease COVID-19, which has spread rapidly throughout the world. Scientists know very little about it.
According to John Hopkins University until 30th May 365.535 people already died and almost 6 million were infected in 182 countries.
Personal Challenge
The project is a big opportunity for each one of us in the way that we can meet new people, work together, and develop an answer for the big question that is the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of isolating ourselves from the world while we wait for the virus to go away, we help our fellows to overcome it with the help of science and technology. Searching and using data from renowned Institutions like NASA, ESA, JAXA, CNES, or CSA we are sure we can present a nice product to help solving the problem worldwide.
Motivator background
The scientific international community warned about the threat of the virus and it's contagious potential and his fast proliferation, almost any country couldn't prepare themselves in order to avoid the damage caused by its spread in national territories and had their health systems collapsed.
Brazil, the team's members country, has become the second in number of COVID-19 cases in the world in the last two weeks. The World Health Organization (WHO) said that Brazil is the new epicenter of the disease as the number is increasing each day.
Due to the lack of and poor management of the distribution of supplies, like hospitals and food supply, not only the public health system (SUS, in Brazil) but also the private hospitals are full of patients infected with the new Coronavirus.
What if we could prevent the next focuses of the sickness based on already existing data of COVID-19 and its spread? And also, what if we could warn about its specific needs concerning supplies to authorities helping to manage his efforts for the locations that are in need?
Space Agencies in Our Project
For the development of our API, we intend to use data of populational density based on The NASA Worldview app and NASA Earth Observation (NEO). Also, we will use data from the National Institute of Meteorology (INMET).
Tools
Built with
In our solution, we decided to use an API capable of obtaining different types of data and returning them easily and safely. That way, we can work with the data to extract the most useful analysis from it. The API was created using Node.js and the Express framework, free, accessible, and widely used tools.
To build our Frontend prototype, we use the Figma software to create an application that is attractive and easy for the user to manipulate. We were also able to share progress with group members.
Problems
As every hackathon, lack of time is one of the biggest matters that groups may experience during the event. Instead of looking for data being the easiest part of the project, it made us lose a significant amount of time of production that could be used on the factoring of API and Front-end, which directly implies our MVP. The access of NASA and other space agencies data is excluded and hard to use, in the way that it presents itself decentralized and has different paths for being accessed. In summary, the bootcamp videos were essential for our group to access the databases and structure the whole idea, but it could have been an easier task to access all this space agencies data, allowing that the non-academic public could access it.
Achievements
Impact
The project aims to address scalable solutions to issues of poor transparency in the capacity of hospitals available for the topic of rapid treatment of the disease. It will help those governments who do not have a defined path to deal with the new coronavirus or even do not have a logistic plan to tackle the pandemic situation. Also, citizens can access the product to find the best way to look for medical help.
Solution
IdeaFix is a free platform that gathers world and local data that elaborates a well informative and interactive dashboard that can predict where the health system is on the way to collapse. Any decision-maker or engaged NGOs can use this information to best address local support and citizens can find the emptiest place to go in case of infection.
Our application correlates COVID-19 cases and deaths with real-time data from climate and satellite maps, giving an advanced indicator of where the most crowded and empty hospitals in the surveyed region are. Identifying the best hospital early can offer the shortest response time and more agile measures can be taken to minimize the socioeconomic impact.
According to the number of cases and temperature data predict which countries are close to having their health systems collapse and when they will collapse based on the number of beds per 1000 inhabitants taking into account the population density (main factor of virus spread) and the average temperature.
Applicability and Economic Feasibility
First, we will use the already existing COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) for tracking contamination and the spread of coronavirus. Doing it so, we are able to correlate it to other data, like the environmental ones about temperature and population density, predicting where the virus is more likely to spread easily. Secondly, our product comes in handy for governmental and international representatives entities that need to focus on areas where the health system can’t bear the high demand of patients.
As global and local entities use our software for tracking COVID-19 cases, they will be able to focus their resources where it really would make the difference, avoiding giving unnecessary supplies to regions where the virus still is not as violent as the hotspots. Doing so, they can prevent the collapse of various health systems from different locations while still taking care of the ones that have already collapsed.
Future Plans
The IdeaFix team has a lot of ideas for helping people to make better use of data, starting with national coverage of COVID-19 and incorporating other illnesses into the project’s scope that could be traced by data crossing, just like malaria, ebola, H1N1, and even the flu.
Besides, IdeaFix has the idea of creating new platforms to integrate marginalized communities, which often suffer from a lack of access to health services around the world.
Acknowledgment
We appreciate:
YouTube
https://twitter.com/IdeaFixProject
Figma
https://www.figma.com/proto/w8FFSv4N19geEaqE1gfG5k/IDEAFIX?node-id=0%3A2&scaling=min-zoom