CovFree

Individuals should decide what an essential service is to them CovFree reduces risk, not freedom by introducing a contact point system to reduce contact and risk without shutting down businesses.

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Inspiration

Lockdowns are detrimental to the economy and to the mental health of our communities.

Shutdowns of non-essential services have negatively impacted small businesses and those who use their services regularly.

Victoria lost 128,000 jobs in April 2020 alone, compared to 38,000 jobs in March 1991 which was the largest single-month job reduction in Victoria in the 1990s recession.

Furthermore, the decision of what is essential and non-essential to consumers is made without any input from the consumers themselves. For example, exercise is critical to many people's mental health. To those in this group that have home delivery for their groceries, the gym may be a more essential business than a supermarket.

However, under the current system, only supermarkets are essential — gyms are not.

We want to reduce the financial and psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and future disasters, on our community by introducing a point system that reduces risk without shutting down businesses.

What it does

Our mission with CovFree is to reduce risk without reducing freedom.

CovFree extends on the current QR code check-in system, introduces the concept of contact points that allows individuals to visit the services they need most while continuing to reduce and trace their exposure.

Each user has a set amount of contact points each day to spend where they like, decided by the government based on current regulations. Each business will also cost a number of contact points to visit, weighted based on the exposure risk at the business - the more people checking in to a location, the larger the weight of that location. Users will check-in at visited locations via CovFree's QR code scanner, which will log their visit while deducting the number of points of the business from the user's point balance.

Users can decide what is essential to them through budgeting their points - they can search up locations in advance to determine the cost of visiting. They can also manage their check-ins by viewing their check-in history. Their exposure to the virus will remain reduced since there is a limit to the number of places they can visit depending on their point balance.

Businesses are no longer strictly classified as essential and non-essential. However, the risk of exposure is still mitigated, as high-risk businesses will have a high point cost, deterring against a high number of visitors. Businesses can now decide for themselves whether enough people will visit them to be worth staying open, and have the opportunity to make any changes to their business model to meet the circumstances. Therefore, businesses essential to the community will still remain available to those who truly need them.

How we built it

The CovFree proof-of-concept demo is built with React and NodeJs Express frameworks.

Half the team worked on the codebase and made sure we had a working demonstration ready for submission. The other half of the team concentrated on designing and prototyping the ideal UI, and refining and preparing materials for our submission and pitch.

We were able to combine the design and codebase to create our final web app.

In the future, CovFree will be integrated with databases and connected with cloud providers to enable more data-driven features

Furthermore, the application in the future will also feature automatic adjustments to the daily contact point balance of users, and the point cost of visiting business taking into account data such as COVID-19 case number data, the popularity of businesses, and government regulations.

Challenges we ran into

Ideation of our project Each of us had ideas of solutions for a range of different problems, so it was hard to settle on one issue we all had the same vision for.

Defining the scope of our project For Melbourne, Australia, the COVID-19 pandemic is (luckily/hopefully) at its end, so we needed to define our project scope to ensure that is was still relevant post-pandemic (and we did - see What's Next for CovFree below!)

Project tracking and teamwork Given that the hackathon was all-remote this year, it proved to be difficult to maintain motivation and effective communication across the team.

Front-end implementation of styles Replicating the prototyped UIs using code into dynamic, functionally correct webpages was definitely a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Despite the idea initially being highly-targeted towards problems during COVID-19, our solutions are now adaptable to many situations!
  • Our designers had no design experience but we learned how to use Figma during the hackathon, and built the entire app prototype!
  • We were able to replicate most of the prototyped pages in actual code - and the product of that is a working example that proves our concept!
  • We stuck to it towards the end - despite everything!

What we learned

  • How to critically analyse our ideas and refine their scope
  • How to prototype using Figma (and how to transfer the Figma prototypes into the real app!)
  • Continued to improve our knowledge of React and Node
  • How to write an elevator pitch
  • How to work well with a team remotely (especially how to communicate effectively and keep the motivation up)

What's next for CovFree

There was only so much we could do in 48 hours. Additional features we plan to add to CovFree include

  • Journey tracking: Not all exposure sites are businesses, allowing CovFree to track your journeys will result in more accurate contact tracking
  • Variable point cost: As people use the app, we would be able to collect anonymous data in real-time and can make accurate forecasts on the number of people at a location at certain times during the day. This can then be used to vary the point cost at the location to encourage off-peak activity.

We also plan to increase the scope of CovFree by implementing additional features relevant to different disasters. For example, resource management is a major issue in most disasters so instead of Contact points, we will implement Resouce Points. Properly tracking resources and spending resource points on the CovFree app will solve the issue of depleted resources and panic buying.

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