KOCHI: Booking a slot for Covid-19 vaccination will no longer be a Herculean task. Thanks to Abhishek V Ashok, 21, a third-year BSc Computer Applications student at Sacred Heart (SH) College, Thevara, an android app, which alerts users when an empty slot is available, has been developed. Called ‘Vaccine Finder’, the app is awaiting approval from Google. However, the public can download the app from the link https://abishekvashok.github.io/vaccine-finder/
“The Vaccine Finder will check for vaccines on your behalf and alert you when one is available in your area of choice, so that you do not need to keep refreshing pages or constantly keep searching. The user only needs to enter the district or pincode in which they want to find out availability of slots.The app will automatically search for the vacant slots and will give a notification to the user when there is a vacant slot,” said Abhishek.
The app also allows the user to categorise the search bar based on the age slab. “In addition to providing a district- and pincode-based search, we have also included an age-based search tool. With this, the user can search vaccines based on their age,” he said, adding, the app uses Cowin API and queries the API every minute in the background to check for slots. “Even elderly people have a hard time getting a slot. So I decided to help them and, based on that, I developed a vaccine finder. I also tried it out among my friends and they were successful because they were able to book the slots without painstakingly searching for hours,” he said.
Abhishek had won a global programming competition conducted by Google called Google Code-in and had travelled to Google’s HQ at their invitation. He is currently on a fellowship for one of Facebook’s open-source projects as a Master League Hackathon (MLH) Fellow.