BHUBANESWAR: A group of 25 students and experts from the City have developed a mobile application which has all features embedded into its matrix - starting from news feeds to statistics, tips by health experts and motivational videos of corona warriors.
The newly-launched COVID-19 tracker android application, D.O.T. (Disease Outbreak Tracker) was launched via the ‘D.O.T’ website on Saturday night. After six days, it will be available for download on Google playstore.
As soon as the coronavirus pandemic took over headlines on all national and international platforms, engineering student Om Sovan Das was perturbed. While browsing through some news portals on March 25, he struck upon the idea of developing an application to assist people and the governments to track the outbreak. “I wanted people to have access to accurate information and stay away from fake news,” he claimed. The 22-year-old took help from City-based Startup mentor Priyadarshi Sadangi of My Startup Yatra (a firm recognised by Startup Odisha) to form a team of 25, who could work from home.But where does the application gets the data from? As the makers claimed, they crowdsource the data from WWW.COVID19INDIA.ORG via an Application Program Interface (API). The website, WWW.COVID19INDIA.ORG, is managed by more than 6,000 volunteers from across the country. In this website, the data is collected from various State Government bulletins, official social media handles and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare updates.
While the Health Ministry uploads data at certain time of a day, the volunteers claimed they keep updating the figures based on state bulletins in every four hours. “For India, we use all the data provided by Ministry of Health. The world data is sourced from WHO,” claimed Sovan. The application has incorporated links to government helplines, video stories of frontline heroes and tech support for donation to PM CARES Fund.
“Users can take our 14 health questions as per WHO guidelines. Based on their answers, they are evaluated by our on board health expert, Dr Chandan Kumar Patra, a general physician and diabtologist from City’s VSS Nagar area. In case there’s a suspicious case, we will inform the local authorities,” added Sovan.
Students from ITER (SOA University), CAET (OUAT), CET, Srusti Academy of Management, BIITM, NSUT (Delhi), PES University (Bangalore) have developed the application. They created the application while working from their respective homes in different cities across the State. “It’s not a profit-making or business oriented application. We have created this to help people and government by investing our time and energy,” said Aman Sahoo, technical head of the group.
“This application is location-based. Government can use it to learn about the health of people as users upload their details. In the coming days, we are working on adding Geo Fencing to it. It will allow the Government to track movement of suspected or infected people easily,” Sahoo added.
According to a resident of Tianjin in China, Ning, the country had developed an application to track the movement of infected persons during the later stages of lockdown.