As India prepares itself for Stage-3 community transmission of the Novel Coronavirus, implementing Social Distancing measures becomes of paramount importance. The government is also actively looking for methods to enforce social distancing for when they decide to end the lockdown. Stepping outside to procure essentials leads to crowding at the medical shops, grocery shops and other service locations increases the risk of contagion. One way to mitigate the risk is to visit essential stores when the crowds are less, but there is presently no way for an individual to know that information remotely.
We wish to bridge the gap created by the lack of information using Mobile Technology. The goal of this app is to provide the citizens the location and the live count of the nearest stores with the least crowd. Using the App, citizens can elect to visit essential stores at the most suitable time, when the crowd is less in number, thus implementing Social Distancing in a very unique way. The following Services have been considered as essentials in the App implementation :-
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Hospitals
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Medical Store / Pharmacies
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Grocery Shops/ Supermarkets
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ATMs/ Banks
The App has two types of end users :-
- Service providers
- Citizens
The app shall provide the following features :-
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A dashboard that provides information about the nearest essential services, expected travel time, Live Crowd Count (LCC) in real time. Addresses the need of reducing contact amongst others. It will also even out the times in which people move out of their homes, which is the best case possibility to avoid the spread and flatten the curve.
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The functionality to be able to send a list of products to either grocery stores or pharmacies so that the shopkeeper can keep the order ready in time for you to go collect it and pay for it. This will reduce wait times in the shops and the time in which a person comes in contact with others as well.
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Filters to order the list of stores on the basis of Distance, Time and LCC and a search functionality for ease of use.
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Option to avail direction / navigation using Google Maps.
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Spreading awareness.
Note: The data for the live crowd count has to be collected by the means of QR codes. Every shop will have its very own QR code and customers must scan it using the app on arrival. This will intimate his/her presence in the shop giving us a very accurate LCC.
Constraints: Limited number of calls to google places api (can be scaled if a paid cloud account is used).
For developer instructions see Developer Wiki
We want to keep this app as open source and wish to contribute to the community.
Please feel free to contribute!