Detect COVID-19 with an android application “HealthChecker”
Do You Have COVID-19 ???
1.Introduction:
We recently (Oumayma Bougossa and Moussaddak Meddeb) released our final project in Holberton school that we’ve been working on for a while. The project is called “HealthChecker”. We wanted to share our story around.
How we came up with this idea?
How did we work to make it happen while still doing my day job?
What the results looked like?
Since the pandemic, many people became more concerned about health wellness that targets a wave of mental health issue from ‘covid-19', So we worked on the idea of an” HealthChecker” which is an android application that helps us understand our health symptoms by answering multiple questions to determine: is your condition an emergency? is it that bad?
I worked on this project with one of my peers. We split the work amongst us, I worked on the front-end while collaborating with moussadak meddeb on the Back-end creating the transaction core.
2. Summarize:
Architecture :
Technology :
We used :
3.Challenges:
For technical challenges, one of the challenges we discovered about the project that this app could evolve and develop beyond our idea, from a simple Covid symptoms checker to almost a powerful health assistance application. On top of that, in order to develop this app, we need to decide what technology we will use to code this application, because, for starter, we already decided that the application must be an android app, so we could use all of the options available to code with like JAVA, Kotlin, Flutter. after research and asking experts about their opinion, we decided to use JAVA instead of Flutter for many reasons, JAVA has a large set of developers are available easy to find info, unlike Flutter, also in order to code with Flutter we need to learn the dart programming language and that’s not an efficient considering with amount of time given for this project. In addition to that, learning JAVA and focusing on mastering the android studio environment seems to be the right choice and was very challenging, moreover, none of us has experience with android developing applications or JAVA.So, we started by learning Java basics and then develop a simple application (with 1 class and 1 layout) using android studio, to get familiar with the IDE environment.
For non-technical challenges, let’s start by mentioning that none of us has any experience programming in JAVA or Android development, on top of that, the android studio itself requires that you take some time to understand it by reading documentation, some articles, or watching tutorials on youtube and that’s demanded a quit of time.
Also, We can say time management was a bit difficult to do in a collaborative project because some Tasks depend on others, in order to start a new task easily, you’ll have to wait for the previous task to be done by your partner.
Although designing a layout may seem for the first time not that difficult, but what we find was mindblowing that in order to make a finite layout it required so much time and concentration because managing the constraints of the parts of the layout is definitely challenging and so delicate for someone without any experience of android development and the more the layout become complicated the more fixing errors becomes even more difficult all of this without speaking of the complexity of the algorithm and you have to spend a lot of time searching for the right forum that could help fix your bug.
Features :
The possibility to detect if the user has covid-19 symptoms based on information he provides.
The possibility to call 190 from the application.
It’s been a lot of time and emailing and tweaking and hoping it’d work out, and it’s so satisfying to see it finally get out.
Thanks for reading!
Notes :
You could find the final version of the application on GitHub: https://github.com/oumaymabg/Health-checker
If you have any question please don’t hesitate to contact me on my LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/oumayma-bougossa-76b438188/
