CGGS | Devpost

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Inspiration

There are many inefficiencies within epidemic relief methods:

“The decision to cut 80% of its epidemic prevention activities overseas…’would significantly increase the chance an epidemic will spread...and endanger lives in our country and around the world.’” - Drash, Wayne. CNN, “Cuts to CDC epidemic programs will endanger Americans, former chief says”

“The organisation’s own investigations uncovered evidence of fraud, with more than $2.1m (£1.6m) lost in Sierra Leone, probably stolen by staff in collusion with local bank officials” - The Guardian

“...some families say that they are still receiving only meager portions, and ill-equipped and overburdened local mayors have been left to figure out how to haul supplies from regional drop-off points to their storm-ravaged towns.” - Healy, Jack. New York Times, “Aid is Getting to Puerto Rico. Distributing It Remains a Challenge”

There is a lack of public health awareness and transparency surrounding epidemics which misleads donors and results in the misallocation of funding and critical resources.

What it does

Optimize Relief Funding

Remove overhead costs in epidemic donations. Crowdsource funding for resources directly to verified vendors. Ensure relief funding ends up in the right hands.

Increase Awareness

Innovate and revolutionize response and control of epidemics and natural disasters. Generate awareness of epidemics in real time.

Improve Future Responses

Decrease lag time. Increase efficiency in mobility and transportation of funds/goods/services.

Outside of major headlines, there is a general lack of relief effort transparency conveniently accessible to the public when it comes to epidemics. Using epidemic modelling tools and smart contracts, Sana aims to be a one-stop shop where users can learn about how well different mitigation techniques work and contribute in a meaningful, secure, and well-informed way.

How we built it

Page 1 - Epidemic Playground: A simulation that allows users to see what techniques, methods, and tools work best to mitigate the spread of an epidemic.

We imbedded a epidemic playground app, holko.pl/epidemic-v2, to teach people about how epidemics spread and what we can do to mitigate the growth of the virus at hand.

Here, we utilized LandScan data to find population density and pulled a shapefile to determine boundaries within a specific country. We then pulled a simple SIR model and plugged in data from different influenza strains.

Page 2 - Real-Time Modeling: A global, interactive map that shows all current epidemics.

We imbedded a real-time monitoring app, healthmap.org, to show the most recent events related to infectious diseases.

Page 3 - Donations: A donation page that allows users to be aware of the specific resource needs faced by different epidemics and utilizes smart contracts to eliminate the middleman for relief donations.

The Donations page is a simple GUI to emulate what people can donate to. We started building a Smart Contract through IBM’s Hyperledger, but ultimately ran out of time to fully finish the build.

Page 4 - Social Media Platforms: A place where users can participate in Sana’s social media movement to spread awareness about epidemics.

Challenges we ran into

In the beginning stages of development, we identified difficulties using Jade to navigate to our different web pages. Once we overcame that obstacle it was a matter of figuring out how to design each individual web page to portray our goals/ideas to the user in a clear and concise manner.

We also ran into two problems for the backend. The first was finding the correct data files to plug into the SIR epidemic model. Once we were able to create a .asc (ASCII) file, it allowed us to build the graph and find the cost function using population density from LandScan. The second problem we ran into was actually trying to build a Smart Contract through IBM’s Hyperledger. We weren’t too knowledgeable with navigating through the Composer Playground. Also, we learned not to use Homebrew when installing Docker and to download the package from the website itself to give a full suite of compatibility.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was the first hackathon for the majority of the team, so it was a learning experience and a testament to the team’s chemistry to work together and create a viable, working product by the submission deadline.

What we learned

The lack of dedication to a coordinated and effective relief effort by all in the supply chain that guarantees the delivery of funds and resources to people in need is a problem that is easily identifiable, but difficult to solve. Our team learned that by allowing donors and contributors to actively participate in the relief effort, those in need can see real help faster, and those working to control the epidemic can do so more effectively with the resources provided to them.

What's next for Sana

Use Cases Use AWS Cloud Formation that is scalable for situations with concurrent epidemics that require extensive resource allocation. Ex: U.S. federal government requires scalable solution for a spike in requests to agencies like FEMA and USAID. Applicable to disaster relief efforts.

Predictive Analysis Use past incidents to improve on supply chains, response/lag times, more effective resource allocation, communications, etc. Ex: After an epidemic is controlled, run a regression report, condense it, and circulate the key information to users to improve upon epidemic response strategies & processes.

Vetting Verified Vendors Define reliability factors that determine the credibility of Sana’s verified vendors. Rate each reliability factor and make visible to users. Track reliability of vendors (response time, delivery/success rate, effective supply chains).