AID SQUAD
Decentralized Global Pandemic Information Platform
Life goes on.
Despite current tragic events, we must try to continue with our duties. That’s our responsibility as humans. At GeoDB our team is well prepared to maintain daily activities while respecting WHO’s recommendations to stop the COVID-19 global pandemic. That’s why we are proud to share with you all our latest development, “Aid Squad”, the first decentralized Global Pandemic Information Platform.
Motivation
In GeoDB we are aware of the difficult situation that all are experiencing because of the COVID-19 pandemic. After several days of shock knowing the devastation that the virus is producing all around the world, our team agreed to contribute to tackling this emergency scenario and preventing future epidemics. During the last days, we have carried out an extra-effort working on a project which takes advantage of distributed ledger technologies, aimed at fighting against the spread of epidemics. As a result, we have developed “Aid Squad”.
Direct app download Link:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=16K0hip2bBKYWcQuDiAAaFe6xaTfYY5pO
We are currently waiting for PlayStore to approve the app. Coming soon!
What is “Aid Squad”?
Aid Squad is a non-profit project developed by GeoDB with the intention of contributing to society in the fight against the spread of epidemics and pandemics, offering a tool in which citizens can share their symptoms anonymously and express their support for solidarity causes.
We believe in the good faith of people and their predisposition to collaborate for the community interest even more in such catastrophic scenarios. So, we assume that people are willing to share their information, knowing that this is a way to help.
Aid Squad stores all sent data in the IOTA tangle (https://thetangle.org), in order to take advantage of distributed ledger technologies. Therefore, all data is publicly available and tamper-proof, so everyone can access it and nobody can modify it, but at the same time considering anonymity of private data.
In our case, we use this data to create visualization tools and heat maps to represent the geographical distribution of users who may have certain diseases. These graphical resources are accessible to all users of the Aid Squad App, and they can be considered valuable pieces of information (e.g. showing which areas concentrate more people with a certain disease). However, it is necessary to highlight that, as these resources mirror the data sent by users, their validity depends on the veracity of the input data. So, under no circumstances, they should be treated as comparable to the information shared by official institutions.
Aid Squad System
Aid Squad system has different functionality which involves the following use cases.
Gathering Data
This process involves three steps.
1.- Introducing data
Citizens can download the Android app called “Aid Squad” on their mobile devices. The only requirement to use the app is the allowance to share user’s location.
After that, users can share their data by filling the fields included in the PHR (Personal Health Record) tab. This is a form that includes:
