The Dalbs| Where There’s a Link, There’s a Way

Where There’s a Link, There’s a Way

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a proliferation of websites and portals developed to share resources about the topic. Your challenge is to find innovative ways to present and analyze integrated, real-time information about the environmental factors affecting the spread of COVID-19.

Privacy Oriented Contact Tracing App

Summary

Reliable data about the amount of Covid-19 patients is essential in developing ways to combat the pandemic caused by the disease. We provide a way to increase the data precision and people's awareness by secure contact tracing app. The app will automatically collect data on person's contacts, and notify the users about the risk of infection.

How We Addressed This Challenge
  1. Contact tracing app will serve as a platform that will integrate the resources (research findings) about COVID-19 for the larger audience, for example, by posting links to websites with information on the disease.
  2. The app will collect data on potential COVID-19 patients or those without symptoms, (in the future including age and sex of the app users) and post it on the SEDAC Global COVID-19 Viewer. This will greatly increase the reliability of the data. This then can be used for analysis of the COVID-19 impact and environmental factors affecting the spread of the virus.
  3. The information that will be collected by the app may be used by healthcare providers or the government to track the situation in certain regions (cities, areas) to control the spread of the disease and implement on time regulations.
How We Developed This Project
  1. Global pandemic caused by COVID-19 highlights the importance of relevant and reliable information. Our goal was to create a tool that would both collect more precise data on the amount of potentially infected people and inform larger audience, especially those ones at risk. The privacy oriented contact tracing app would be very useful in dealing with these goals by making the COVID-19 data fuller, informing people, and potentially preventing future exponential growth.
  2. We splitted the work depending on the coding experience with Swift (IOS) and Python (server). We also performed cross checking for the merge requests approvals.
  3. The POCT app would be integrated with SEDAC Global COVID-19 Viewer hosted by NASA. It would collect data on potentially infected people (Ones that were in contact with positively tested patient) and post it on the website. It would also send the data from the website on any given country to the user that requests to do so.
  4. Swift 5.2, Python 3.8, PyCharm, PostgreSQL, Figma designing tool, GitHub platform, Xcode, Flask, Debian Server, SQLAlchemy, Alamofire.
  5. We were new to app designing, so it took some time to learn the basics. We had a few coding issues including the following:

a) Correctly encoding POST parameters in Swift so Flask server understands its format. The issue was that Swift was not sending the http body in the correct encoding resulting in Flask not understanding the request. 

b) The server could not recognize the encoded URL strings correctly

We achieved high privacy through generation of random unique keys on each device. We have achieved the successful work of the basic features of the app like key exchanging between devices, submission to the server, checking with the database, and alerting on match with the server.

Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
Tags
#contacttracing,#covid19data
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.