COVID-19: Indian team among 3 chosen for IBM's Call for Code challenge

An Indian team, that has designed an app to help individuals to evaluate their symptoms of COVID-19 and connect them with medical professionals, is among the three groups chosen for this year's edition of IBM's Call for Code challenge.

Call for Code is a global initiative for developers to solve pressing global problems with sustainable software solutions. While the focus of this year's competition was on addressing climate change, IBM decided to add tech solutions for addressing the COVID-19 crisis as well.

IBM said it recognised the urgency to act, so it created an accelerated timeline for the Call for Code COVID-19 track. Three solutions - Are you Well? (Indian team), COVID Impact (global team that came together at the University of British Columbia) and Safe Queue (created by a developer in Los Angeles) - were chosen.

The Indian team comprised Deepak Goyal, Chandresh Tiwari, Hitesh Choudhary, Manoj Gupta and Yogesh Kumar and the four work with Altran, which is now a part of IT firm Capgemini.

The team has worked on building a comprehensive medical assistance system that could reduce the stress on over-taxed medical systems.

The app is designed to help individuals evaluate their symptoms, aided by IBM Watson Assistant. It then leverages a global dashboard that assigns cases a high, medium or low level of risk based on thresholds set by healthcare providers.

The system allows them to connect them with medical professionals who could use the data to prioritise cases and offer care in a safer manner.

One of the team members, Deepak Goyal said the solution helps the entire society.

"Starting with the user, it's a system to get hooked to a medical infrastructure which is not actually in the hospital, because the hospitals can't take care of everybody at this moment. But it gives them a feeling that the wellness of the people is taken care of," he said.

He added that the solution also helps medical teams because it gives them the power to take care of more people in less time. "It helps them expand their work without being overworked. It takes care of augmenting and expanding the medical infrastructure," he said.

Yogesh Kumar, another team member, noted that the solution uses Watson Assistant chatbots on the backend that helped the team speed up the process.

Gaurav Sharma, Vice President at IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software (IBM SW Labs, Global GSI Partnerships & IBM Cloud Paks AP) said countries globally are facing unprecedented challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic and to address some of these challenges, IBM expanded the scope of Call for Code 2020 to include COVID-19 as a separate track.

"The intent was to urge the global developer community to leverage their creativity, collective skills and open source technologies to respond to some of these pressing challenges. I'm excited that one of the winning solutions is from India, which is home to one of the largest growing developer population in the world," he added.

Since 2018, the Call for Code Global Challenge has grown to over 3,00,000 developers and problem solvers across 168 countries who have participated.

The 'COVID Impact' solution was created by a global team that came together at the University of British Columbia, hailing from Canada, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, and Mexico.

The predictive assessment tool aims to reduce the financial impact of COVID-19 on small businesses. It offers a curated list of federal resources for small businesses, and a real-time news feed of sentiment-analysis evaluated articles.

The solution also offers an economic impact heatmap that visualises where need is greatest, which can help officials direct business aid to specific regions or industries.

The third solution chosen was Safe Queue. Created by a single developer in Los Angeles, the solution is a community-driven mobile app that is intended to replace physical lines at shopping centres, small businesses, and polling places with on-demand virtual lines to enable a safer way to manage entry during COVID-19.

It uses GPS location data to create a virtual queue of those within 1,000 feet of a location, allowing employees to control the queue digitally, and validating entry with a randomly generated QR code for each customer.