The world is witnessing an unprecedented crisis. It is amazing to witness the collaboration happening around to fight the battle of COVID-19. One such initiative is trackcovid-19.org. The crowdsourced illness tracker is the brainchild of an interesting mix of senior health professionals and technical experts. The initiative is a unique amalgamation of medical knowledge and technical know-how to create an application for public good. Let’s know about the application in detail from Dr. Ajay Hegde, who along with his team ideated and brought this highly useful application to life.
Dr. Ajay Hegde is a neurosurgeon by profession and a Senior Clinical Fellow at NHS, Greater Glasgow and Clyde. His application development team includes, Full stack developers Mr. Abhilash Pradam and Mr. Vinayak and Dr. Ramesh Masthi, MD, WHO Advisor, Professor of Community Medicine and Public Health. He functions as an Advisor to the project.
As a doctor how did it strike you to work on an application that is a crowdsourced surveillance system as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
We saw the need for a community-based tracker. You must already be familiar with current dashboards that have come up all over the world. From a public health point of view, these are not of much value. They only give a rough idea of how many people are infected in a state or maximum a district. What is required is a platform that can harness technology further to enable the identification of infected and potential hotspots of infected asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic individuals. This would result in smaller scale mass isolations, thereby reducing the economic and healthcare burden.
What are the sources of this data? Is it for everyone?
It is mainly a crowdsourced platform, but we also get data from various dashboards and open source data where relevant. Yes, everybody has access to the platform. Since we do not divulge any personal details of infected individuals, i.e. their location, address or name, anybody can access the data. Crowdsourced surveillance systems involving the active participation of the general population with self-reporting of health and disease are an attractive option, especially when they are not asked for any information that makes their personal information public.
Please tell us more about trackcovid-19.org and how it uses location information.
We have been closely monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic since the beginning and as health professionals we decided to create a symptom tracker to capture and map COVID-19 cases with the granularity of a zip code. The platform asks the users to self-report on their symptoms and also their exposure to a possible patient. In addition to this the platform also asks for basic demographics such as age, sex and zip code. In addition to the crowdsourced data we also scan the net for open source COVID-19 databases that have zip code locations of tested and confirmed patients. Finally, the data is brought together on a single platform where both crowdsourced symptom data and confirmed positive cases can be used to establish healthy and symptomatic zones. This helps in highlighting infection trends in cities and can be used by health organizations to focus preventive, isolation and treatment efforts towards containment of illness thus enabling governments to open up communities in a controlled fashion, minimizing economic damage.
How are you getting funding and the time to do this?
We are funding the entire initiative out of our own pockets and have tried to use as much open source data and platforms as possible. My team and I really believe in this initiative and have worked in our spare time towards building this platform. We hope this application will help alleviate some of these problems during these challenging times. Active participation from public health organization across the world in sharing data and implementing out of the box technologies will yield results in geofencing the current pandemic.
Also Read: COVID-19: A look at global geospatial challenges and achievements
